Butterflies and Odonates of July

I have had the pleasure of carrying out numerous butterfly and odonate (dragonfly and damselfly) surveys for work throughout southern Ontario this year and I managed to snap a few photos for the blog!

First, here are a few butterflies:

Pearl Crescent

Great Spangled Fritillary

Eastern Tailed Blue, these guys are tiny, about the size of your thumbnail

Hairstreaks are my favourite group of butterflies.  They also fly under the radar so to speak since they are so tiny!  I love the intricate and detailed patterns of stripes, lines and colours that make each species unique.  The most common species I had this week was Banded Hairstreak, but I forgot to get any photos of them.

This Striped Hairstreak was very cooperative!

Sometimes its easiest to put the small butterflies in jars to take a clear look at before you release them.

This guy looks a bit like Hickory Hairstreak since the white lines are on both sides of the stripes on the hind wing, the blue spot on the bottom also extends pretty far past the orange one.

Wild Indigo Duskywing were common in Waterloo today

Another group of small butterflies are the "skippers".  Some of these species are notoriously hard to differentiate from one another without pinning them, which involves killing the individual.  I prefer to catch and release or passively observe, which can make things tricky at times.

Northern Broken Dash

Crossline Skipper

Dragonflies can be just as showy as butterflies, if you don't believe me, check out these photos!

Twelve-spotted Skimmer- male

Lance-tipped Darner.  One of many species of "Mosaic" Darners

My grandmother doesn't usually teach me much about insects, but one thing that she told me is that they called them darning needles back in the day because they looked like large needles flying around, and they thought as kids that if they caught you, they would sew up your mouth! Hence, the name darner.

Eastern Pondhawk