Buckeye Butterflies

     One warm, sunny afternoon in August of last year in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, I visited an overgrown retention basin that was filled with a variety of tall vegetation. Some of those plants were cattails, rushes, sneezeweeds with yellow flowers, swamp milkweeds that had pink blossoms and ironweeds showing pinkish-purple blooms.  A variety of insects, including several common kinds of butterflies, swarmed on the attractive ironweed flowers.  And some of the butterflies on the ironweed blooms were tiger and spice-bush swallowtails, monarchs, pearl crescents, a few kinds of skippers, and buckeyes.  In fact, I never saw so many buckeye butterflies in one place at one time as that afternoon.  There were several of them fluttering among the many ironweed blossoms at once.  The ironweed flowers and buckeye butterflies together in the sunlight were beautiful, a sight not to be forgotten.  And the lovely, lively buckeyes were particularly interesting to me because of their unprecedented abundance.  They were the highlight of that summer day.   
     Why is this butterfly species called buckeyes?  Buckeyes have wingspans of up to two and one half inches.  Their pretty wings are mostly brown, which blend these butterflies into their backgrounds and make them nearly invisible when they are still.  These butterflies also have two round spots on the upper side of each of four wings, making a total of eight "eye" spots.  And one fake eye on each fore-wing, for a total of two, are particularly large and dark, looking like the eyes of deer in somebody's imagination.  The "eyes" on buckeyes' wings scare away birds and other would-be predators.
     Buckeyes prefer open, sunny habitats across much of the United States, but are more common in The South.  They nectar on a variety of flowers in those sunny environments, and produce a few generations of themselves each year.     
     Buckeye caterpillars hatch from eggs laid by their mothers on their host plants.  Those larvae grow to be two inches long and have dark bodies with faint, yellow lines from head to rear; colors that camouflage them.  And they have spines on each segment of their long bodies.  Those spines help protect the larvae from birds and other creatures that would eat them. 
     Buckeye larvae consume the leaves of plantain, snap dragons, Veronicas, monkey flowers and other kinds of vegetation.  They change from larvae to adult butterflies in a couple of weeks in pupae of their own making.  They emerge from those cocoons as winged adults ready to fly and sip sugary nectar in blossoms.     
     Some buckeyes that hatch in The South, colonize the northern part of the United States in summer.  The last generation of buckeyes for the year in the north migrates south along the Atlantic coast in autumn.  Those adults hibernate in winter in The South, and start a new generation of buckeyes the next spring.  Some buckeyes going north in summer gives the species more room to lay eggs on host plants and more flowers to sip nectar from, which might increase buckeyes' numbers.
     Buckeyes have a rapid flight.  And males are ever on the alert to mate with females of their kind.  They wait for females on the "bait" of nectar-laden blooms in summer.  And male buckeyes seem quarrelsome, chasing away rival males from "their" flowers, and even pursuing other insects away from their blooms, leaving more sweet nectar for buckeyes. 
     This August, watch for buckeyes and other kinds of butterflies among nectar-filled blossoms in sunny habitats.  Those beautiful insects have interesting life cycles.  They make summer days more intriguing.