January 2020 Sightings

Happy New Year!
I brought in the year with an American Snout and a Wooly Bear Cat.

[A nice start to 2020! Happy Butterflying in 2020 to everyone! jc]

Continuing Common Buckeye caterpillar on snapdragon. Continuing Black Swallowtail and Spicebush Swallowtail chrysalises.

While birding we found 4 Red Admirals and a Anglewing…or 2.

[Very cool! Or maybe pleasantly warm? ;-) We also had four red admirals from CMPt State Park last year at this time: Jan 8, 2019. And our record high count for red admirals in one spot in January also comes from that park: five individuals found by Sam Galick and Will Kerling on Jan 20, 2015. jc]

Well, I know I've never seen Red Admiral in January before… these are two different individuals… hard to tell how many are involved in the spate of sightings over the last few days… the one you can see the topside clearly is a bit beat up, the one peeking over the boardwalk was pretty fresh looking…

1 Red Admiral along red trail boardwalk (12:00pm).

The butterflies did not get much of a chance to land as their were many people walking. Ran into Harvey T. and we saw painted turtles, a spotted turtle, a northern water snake, and his wooly bear from 1/1/20 (Harvey has photos; I and my camera phone failed miserably once again). In other locations I had bull frogs, spring peeper, more spotted turtles, and a bat.

[Sounds like a spring day down there. Question mark is our third species of 2020. jc]

Mourning Cloak flew by us.

[Nice. This is our first report of mourning cloak in the New Year and gives us four species for 2020. It also makes 2020 only the third year when we have seen them in flight in January (previously only January 2012 and January 2013. jc]

[This report gives us two reports in the month for both mourning cloak and snout – nice! jc]

Nice find landed briefly.