When I am walking through the woods adjacent to the marsh, I often see small brown butterflies flitting about, but it’s rare that one lands in a place where I can photograph it. Last week, however, I got lucky and I was finally able to get some shots of one of these elusive butterflies.
Now that I have the images, I am faced with the difficult task of trying to identify the butterfly. There are a lot of brown butterflies with a numerous eye spots on the wings and to my untrained eyes, they all look pretty much the same. I think this one may be of the genus Lethe, but is it a Pearly Eye, an Appalachian Brown, an Eyed Brown, or something entirely different?
For now, I’ll fall back on an old habit and make up my own name for the butterfly and call it the Beautiful Woodland butterfly.
© Michael Q. Powell. All rights reserved.
Mike Powell 