With a shift in the wind I thought I might be a good idea to run out to South Padre Island and look for late migrant passerine birds. There were a few warblers at Sheepshead but not a many. So I headed up island to the Convention Center to check it out. As lunchtime was nearing I drove through the east parking lot with plans to drive out on the flats and watch shorebirds while eating lunch. But a medium sized dark butterfly landed in front of me and I knew what it would be. I've had Twintip Buckeye here before.
Then a similarly sized butterfly chased the Twintip Buckeye off and replaced it on the sand. This was the more normal looking Common Buckeye that I had raised in Mason jars as a kid. Walking out in the grass I found a second.
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The north wind had blown in a lot lot of water so driving the flats would be messy. I quickly ate my lunch and headed to the Convention Center where I saw a few warblers. Then I walked out on the boardwalk with the hopes of finding Mangraove Buckeyes in the black mangroves. I saw a distant one and then got lucky with a closer one on the mud under the mangroves. And then it perched on one of the mangrove aerial roots. Now that's a Mangrove Buckeye!
So three species of buckeyes? What's up with that? That certainly doesn't agree with what's in Glassberg's book. Well buckeye systmatics have been messed up for a long time. The fact that lepidopterists can't seem to play together doesn't help. Nick Grishin has been doing a lot of analysis of butterfly DNA recently and published a paper that divides the North American buckeyes into seven species. It's not an easy to read paper but I get more out of it every time I look at it. So our old Tropical Buckeye in the Valley is now Twintip Buckeye and our orange buckeyes out in the mangrove that everyone was ignoring is Mangrove Buckeye. The western Common Buckeye is now Gray Buckeye and the southwestern "nigrofusia" is called Dark Buckeye I guess. The eastern buckeye is still the Common Buckeye. Florida has a different species of Mangrove Buckeye and the Mangrove Buckeye of the Pacific coast of Mexico was split off. These buckeyes all look ifferent and should have been split long ago. But what Nick Grishin is doing with splitting identical species and rearranging genera I'm not so excited about.
