Rondeau Butterfly Count

Just a brief note regarding Life on a Sandspit: it seems to have garnered a lot of interest and is doing well.

It is currently available at the Friends of Rondeau store (inside the Rondeau Visitor Centre), as well as the Bayview Market, just outside the Rondeau PP gates. It is also available via the Sydenham Field Naturalists, and you can see it, along with other nature publications on their web site here. I am slowly finding other local sites where it may be available, and will provide updates on those as they occur.

On to the butterfly count post.

Just a few days ago, on July 9, was the annual butterfly count, for the Rondeau area. Over the past 22 years, it has ranged from 35 to 47 species, averaging about 41 species. I don't have the final tally for this year, but based on the area that I and my colleagues did for this one, I think we will definitely be below average both for total species and individuals. I usually get about 18 species, but this year I got only 15. Of course weather is always a factor, and the cool, cloudy, misty weather this year did not bode well. And a downpour of heavy precipitation in the afternoon for some, did not help at all. Nonetheless, it can always be worthwhile to get out and see what is around. The following photos are ones I took while meandering through the several spots I normally cover. I didn't get photos of all the species I recorded, and the results vary.

This first one is the only swallowtail species I encountered, and just one individual!

Black Swallowtail

Bronze Coppers, next, are not a guarantee, and I only saw this one. Fortunately it cooperated to get the kind of photos that allowed me to separate it from the American Copper.

If this count was taken a few years ago, I would have no problem identifying this next one as a Summer Azure. However the lepidopterist taxonomists have examined the Celastrina genus a little differently, and it apparently is not quite so easy, so this one could be as Summer Azure, but I left it as Celastrina sp.

Common Wood-nymph

Eastern Comma

Eastern-tailed Blue

Little Wood-satyr

Monarchs, shown next, got off to a slow start in the count, but as the day wore on, I came across several areas where Common Milkweed was present in the hundreds of plants. One area could have even had more than a thousand plants, so getting several dozen Monarchs was not hard. If I had been able to carefully survey this largest milkweed site, I could have easily doubled the number of Monarchs, but by that time I was losing energy so I did most of my surveying via scanning the large field with binoculars.

Crescent butterflies are normally fairly common, but for some reason, that wasn't the case on this day. I had just this one Northern Crescent.

Although the ? on this next butterfly isn't all that visible, it was indeed a Question Mark.

Red Admirals, at 57 individuals, were by far the most common of the butterflies, other than Cabbage Whites at about 70.

Of course anytime one is out in such habitat, there are always other things to see, so I took advantage of the photo ops I was given. This Eastern Gartersnake was quietly sitting along the edge of one of the first trails I took. I presume it was trying to soak up some of the non-existent sunshine, as it never moved even a bit, although I got quite close.

Along the Erieau Marsh Trail there were the usual things like Great Blue Heron.....

...and even a Trumpeter Swan.

Song Sparrows were common in most areas.....

...as were Red-winged Blackbirds.

Along one area, which follows an old Railway Track, I saw three Wild Turkeys, but true to their character, did not allow me to get very close. This next photo is highly cropped.

Along this same part of the area I covered, I noted several clusters of a Species At Risk, known as Prairie Rose.

And I even saw the occasional day-flying moth that enabled me to shoot it: the Eight-spotted Forester.

Once all the results are tabulated, I will update the results for this count, but as far as I can tell in talking with several other counters, it will not be one of the better ones. Every year is different! Update: there was a total of 1777 individuals of 36 species recorded on this day, so definitely on the low end of average.

 

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