Clouded Skipper

About the Clouded Skipper

A small dark skipper with a velvet sheen and a scatter of glassy spots in the forewing, easiest to study when it stops at a flower - which it does often, with that big-eyed, moth-meets-butterfly look all skippers share. In good light the fresh male shows a purple-gray frosting along the wing edges that no photograph quite prepares you for.

Clouded Skippers fly nearly all season in Texas, from March into December, and they are among the very last butterflies on the wing in fall - a lantana patch in late November is often theirs alone. Several broods succeed each other through the year.

The caterpillars eat grasses, folding and silking a leaf blade into a shelter and feeding at night - a lifestyle so discreet that the butterfly can be common in a yard whose owner has never seen a caterpillar. St. Augustine lawns count as habitat, which explains the species' ease in town.

Like all skippers it flies in quick, darting bursts that defeat the eye; the camera does better at the nectar stops, where one will work a single flower head long enough for a careful approach.