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Mid-March Sightings of Things with Scaled Wings

With temperatures going above 60ºF on this Friday afternoon, it wasn’t much of a surprise to see insect activity from outside my office window. A quick walk outside produced a couple fun lepidopteran finds (Lepidoptera being the “scale-winged” order of insects that include butterflies and moths) which were a pleasant validation for a little backyard habitat preservation. Here are the highlights:

Mourning Cloak! (photo above) While some butterflies migrate south for the winter (like Monarch), and others will overwinter as pupa (like swallowtails) or larva (like skippers), Mourning Cloaks overwinter as adults, which means they can immediately be out flying on these early warms days.

After the butterfly, I decided to check my sap bucket to see how these cool nights and warm days were affecting sap flow, and found a few surprises inside! Overnight a few species of moths had found their way into one bucket, lured by the sweet sap, and were unfortunately caught floating. There is probably a joke to be made about it being St Patrick’s Day yesterday, and these moths were clearly over-indulging, but I’ll stop there and instead happily report they were all still alive and dried off quickly. There were two moths that look like Straight-toothed Sallow (Eupsilia vinulenta), plus one I couldn’t ID (on the left in the photo below – please email naturalist@maineaudubon.org if you know!)

So the reason I wanted to share this fun afternoon discovery is that it feels like a nice example to share of why we say every fall that you should “Leave the Leaves” in your yard. The photo below shows a bit of my yard under the sap bucket that the moths had snuck into, complete with all of last year’s leaves from the tapped maple. These leaves provide shelter for a variety of overwintering insects, and getting to see a few of them out and about today was a heartwarming reminder that little actions can make a big difference.

I’ll give the yard another month or so, at least once we’ve had plenty of warm days for those insect to disperse, before I tidy those leaves up and get some more native plants in the ground around that patch. I’ve put in some Red-twig Dogwood (Cornus sericae) and Arrowwood (Viburnum dentatum) just upslope from this, both of which can host dozens of species of caterpillars.