There are a couple of summer tiger beetles I wanted to find this year. With the season for Eastern Red-bellied Tiger Beetle quickly coming to end, I thought I needed to make a quick run up to NE Texas. Then while checking out the latest tiger beetle finds on iNaturalist, I saw Virginia Metallic Tiger Beetle was beeing seen in College Station. Dang! I loaded up the jeep and took off Sunday morning.
I needed to get some miles behind me so there wasn't much stopping. But lunchtime arrived right when I came to the Coleto Creek crossing on US 77 just west of Victoria. It's always a great place to stop. I quickly ate my lunch and then checked out the bugs under the bridge. Yellow and orange butterflies were puddling at the edge of Coleto Creek. First a bunch of Cloudless Sulphurs.
And then an amazing five Julia Heliconians. I'm sure the summer rain had something to do with so many being in an area where they are not normally common.
Then a little golden skipper. What the??? It was a Least Skippering! This was a new Texas species for me and one I was hoping to find in NE Texas. Turns out this one is the first Victoria County record on iNat.
The afternoon was uneventful as I painfully made my way along crappy east Texas highways to College Station. I checked in to my hotel, ate dinner and waited for dark. Virginia Metallic Tiger Beetle is a nocturnal species. And it's pretty darn common with over three hundred records in Texas on iNaturalist. People often find them in their yards in east Texas. They were being reported just a couple of nights prior along a bike trail in the Lick Creek Greenbelt.
I arrived at the trail head just before dark and looked around. The concrete trail wound through a heavily wooded area. I was hoping for hungry earlybirds that might give me some photographic opportunities in the waning light. But not much going on. As it got darker I saw a few dark shapes scamper along the edge of the vegetation. Damn. This might not be easy. The sun went down at 8:45 and it was getting dark fast. I bumped the ISO up to 12800. That's all my old Canon 7D Mark II can do. I had recently bought a cheap head lamp and I could tell it was not going to be sufficient.
Then I saw an inch long beetle scamper onto the concrete path. I think this is it. It ran like hell as I expected it would. Tiger beetles are thought to be the fastest land animal proportional to their size. In fact they run so fast they have to periodically stop to allow their brains to interpret what they are seeing as they hunt. There was no way my camera's autofocus was going to catch this speedy insect in my weak head lamp's light. I switched to manual focus but still could not get it in my view finder.
But my light was strong enough to disorient the tiger beetle and it started running toward me. To hell with trying to get a photo. I'm going to grab that sucker. And I did. I got this photo with my iPhone.
Actually that turned out better than I had hoped. Then a couple of minutes later I saw second. This one was apparently eating its prey and allowed me to get close enough to get a camera shot.
The next morning I took off early. It was still over two hours to my next destination. The Gus Engling Wildlife Management Area area is the largest and probably the best known of the the many Texas Fish and Game's wildlife management areas. The seven mile road passes though nearly ten thousand acres of oak and grass that is managed for hunting. In recent years it has been a pretty reliable site for the hard to find Eastern Red-bellied Tiger Beetle, a species partial to open rocky or gravelly spots in wooded areas.
I found the spot on the north end of the preserve where a gravelly track runs to a small lake. I had barely started walking when I spied a tiger beetle. But it was just the uber common Ocellated Tiger Bettle.
Then a large bright rusty brown skipper. I thought it was going to be a Silver Spotted Skipper but it turned out to be a Hoary Edge. Only the second I've ever seen.
And then another tiger beetle but this one was a metallic blue with a white apical lunule. Eastern Red-bellied Tiger Beetle! I got lucky as this was the only one I saw and it cooperated nicely.
I spent the next couple of hours chasing dragon and damsel flies. But by 1pm the temperature had reached the 90s and I was done for the day. Mission accomplished!
