Late Beach Report

We got to the beach later this afternoon, after errands.  It's a cloudy, warm, muggy day here with rumbles of thunder as I write this.  No rain yet though.

The Surf Scoter is still hanging around the harbor. According to the range map at the Cornell bird site, he should be wintering in the north, so maybe he's just stopping for rest and some grub before proceeding onto the tundra.

Not a bad day for butterflies though.  I don't know when to stop calling them Spring Azures and switch to Summer Azures, but this one stopped to try and suck some mineral water out of the sand. . .

As did this Eastern Tiger Swallowtail.

And the now familiar American Painted Lady. Last year the "regular" Painted Lady outnumbered them 10:1 or more, but this year I haven't seen any at all that I can identify. The Painted Lady is Northern Hemisphere wide, but the American is, well, American.

 Another way to tell them apart, if you can't see the little white spot surrounded by orange (which you can see above, but not to the left), is the eyespots on the underside of the back wing.  The American Painted Lady has two large spots, while the Painted Lady has four much smaller spots.

There were also Azures in the milkweeds on the sand dunes, not to mention the usual Clouded Sulphurs, who are abundant right now. I saw a couple of butterflies I couldn't identify, I thought I might have seen a Red Admiral, but it was headed to the Eastern Shore too fast to be sure.