Now You See Me...Now You Don't

Day 206: Charles L. Pack Experimental Forest (a University of Washington extension) is a great place to go butterfly hunting. The network of roads and trails sees little foot traffic during the week, and the public is not allowed to enter in vehicles. It's a quiet place unless there is logging going on (it is, after all, an experiment in forestry management), and that is so infrequent that I have only encountered it a few times in the last twenty years. You won't find wildflower meadows there, but you will see a variety of habitats, and there's one in particular which I've dubbed "Mourning Cloak Alley."

I'd thought to find Mourning Cloaks today, but they had an early start and seem to be done for the season. What I found instead were Green Commas, Margined Whites, two Red Admirals, a few dozen Blues which I lack the skill to separate, and a little black-and-white checkerboarded fellow I've enlisted professional help to ID (I suspect it's Pyrgus ruralis, the Two-Banded Checkered Skipper).

Of all the above, the Commas were the most cooperative...too cooperative in the case of this particular specimen. It insisted on landing at my feet, sometimes in front of me, sometimes just a few inches behind. I had to be very careful when I moved to avoid stepping on it. When the wind blew, it opened its wings and laid them flat. When the breeze stopped, it folded them and became almost invisible. Hard to believe that a bright orange butterfly would have any success at playing "Now you see me...now you don't," but the Commas have it down to a science.