2005 Mercer Butterfly Count
Frank Bader
My thanks to the 14 participants in the third Mercer Butterfly Count, sponsored by the Washington Crossing Audubon Society, held on July 3 in beautiful weather. Further thanks are due to Jim Springer who straightened out my Excel errors to help me produce the attached table.
We had a record 41 species for the count. Oddly, we had a record low in the number of individual butterflies with 2306, compared to 4998 for last year. Our first count produced the nation's high number of Pearl Crescents, and the second had the nations high of Little Glassy Wings. I doubt if we will have any national highs in our 2005 count.
New to the count were Harvester, Appalachian Brown, Southern Cloudywing, and Common Checkered Skipper. Seen on previous counts, but missed this time were Red Banded Hairstreak, Question Mark, Common Buckeye, Red Spotted Purple (!), Hackberry Emperor, Crossline Skipper and Sachem.
| BUTTERFLY COUNT RESULTS |
|---|
| Species | Number |
| Swallowtails (Papilionidae) |
| Black Swallowtail | 27 |
| Eastern Tiger Swallowtail | 8 |
| Spicebush Swallowtail | 2 |
| Whites & Sulphurs (Pieridae) |
| Cabbage White | 402 |
| Clouded Sulfur | 91 |
| Orange Sulfur | 190 |
| Coppers, Hairstreaks,& Blues (Lycaenidae) |
| Harvester | 1 |
| American Copper | 3 |
| Coral Hairstreak | 4 |
| Banded Hairstreak | 65 |
| Striped Hairstreak | 5 |
| Gray Hairstreak | 3 |
| Eastern Tailed-Blue | 149 |
| Summer Azure | 11 |
| Brushfoots (Nymphalinae: Nymphalidae) |
| Great Spangled Fritillary | 73 |
| Pearl Crescent | 468 |
| Eastern Comma | 1 |
| Mourning Cloak | 3 |
| American Lady | 4 |
| Painted Lady | 2 |
| Red Admiral | 3 |
| Viceroy | 1 |
| Satyrs, Woodnymphs (Satyrinae: Nymphalidae) |
| Appalachian Brown | 2 |
| Little Wood Satyr | 61 |
| Common Wood-Nymph | 179 |
| Milkweed Butterflies (Danaiae: Nymphalidae) |
| Monarch | 10 |
| Skippers (Hesperiidae) |
| Silver-spotted Skipper | 38 |
| Southern Cloudywing | 1 |
| Horace's Duskywing | 2 |
| Wild Indigo Duskywing | 23 |
| Common Checkered-Skipper | 1 |
| Common Sootywing | 1 |
| Swarthy Skipper | 2 |
| Least Skipper | 38 |
| European Skipper | 10 |
| Peck's Skipper | 5 |
| Tawny-edged Skipper | 5 |
| Northern Broken-Dash | 122 |
| Little Glassywing | 252 |
| Delaware Skipper | 16 |
| Dun Skipper | 22 |
| TOTAL # OF INDIVIDUALS | 2306 |
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