This is the first time I have seen one of these butterflies at my studio. This is a very fast medium-sized butterfly called the Mangrove Skipper, and photos do not do it justice. Those streaks of electric blue were quite an attention grabber when I was out at my passion-vine covered fire bush trying to get shots of wasps and bees. The blue streaks flashed brightly on its black wings in the afternoon light, as if the creature was emitting sparks, but my phone camera wasn’t quite able to capture it.

Did I mention how fast these things are? 

The Mangrove Skipper lays its eggs on Red Mangrove, the mangrove with great big arching reddish roots that help support it in mucky ground, not the one that has short soda-straw roots sticking straight up out of the muck. There aren’t too many Red Mangroves around here, but there are a few on our nearby coast at least as far north as Weeki Wachee or so, here and there sprouting up from the seagrass beds to form tiny colonies which eventually might gather enough debris to build islands. Maybe there are more Red Mangrove up here than people think. We do have plenty of the snorkel-rooted black mangroves, but the limited reading I have done says this butterfly species is strictly dependent upon Red Mangrove to succeed. I’ll have to keep reading, and looking for these beauties, to be sure. I would be a bit surprised if it couldn’t also use Black Mangrove as a larval host. 

This one wasn’t interested in mangrove trees today; it was more focused on feeding from our very frangrant Passion Flower / May-Pop Vine which sprawls up and through a big firebush, and it also visited the always-abundant Spanish Needle with its white, daisy-like flowers and barbed seeds. The field guides did mention this plant, also known as bidens alba.

Supposedly the range of this skipper butterfly doesn’t extend this far north; most sources say it doesn’t get past Pinellas County. So here up by Spring Hill it is probably a rare treat to see one. 

It may be that Red Mangroves have rebounded to an old range now that the trees are protected, or else is advancing northward in a warm cycle.  

(No doubt Hernando deSoto was glad to be clear of them as he and his command pressed northward away from their ships. They look impossible to walk through. )

In the past, people cut a lot of mangroves down, thinking them weedy and an obstruction to their fishing, or their view of the water, unaware or simply not caring that it is a very bad idea to clear away the buffering trees. But mangroves are what holds Florida’s edges down when hurricanes roar through, and mangroves are also nurseries for many game fishes, crabs, shellfish, insects and coastal nesting birds. They help buffer the breakers when storms come, and provide a little salt-tolerating windbreak where little else could do. 

—Susan A. Walton