2024 August 5 morning

Here are some photographs from yesterday’s Butterfly Walk.

Western Pondhawk  Erythemis collocata  (Odo.: Libellulidae)  Axiza Cooper

Woodland Skipper Ochlodes sylvanoides  (Lep.: Hesperiidae)  Aziza Cooper

California Ringlet Coenonympha californica  (Lep.: Nymphalidae – Satyrinae) Aziza Cooper

Complicated Essay on a Complicated Butterfly    (Jeremy Tatum)
   The butterfly above, photographed by Aziza at Island View Beach, is part of an enormous assemblage of similar butterflies stretching across North America and Europe, sometimes referred to as the “tullia complex”.   We have usually referred to it as a “ringlet” with or without some preceding adjective.  The huge Holarctic complex has many different variations, some clinal, some disjunct, most with a few to many “ringlet” markings on the wings, although the ones we get here in the Victoria area seem not to have even a trace of any ringlet mark.  (Let us know if you find any with a trace of a ringlet.)

From this year, 2024, I am trying to follow the 2023 Annotated Taxonomic Checklist  (ATC) edited by Pohl and Nanz.  The ATC treats most North American populations as a single species Coenonympha california, of which it lists 18 named subspecies.  Whether all of these are genuine subspecies or whether some of them are “forms” I don’t know.  I think our subspecies is Coenonympha california insulana.  The ATC does not deal with English names, but I propose on this site to call our butterfly the California Ringlet (in spite of its absence of ringlet marks).

If we follow the ATC, then, C. california is specifically distinct from C. tullia, which is known today in the U.K. as the Large Heath (but at one time called there the Small Ringlet).  There are apparently a few populations of genuine C. tullia in North America, but not here.  The ATC also lists a third species, C. haydenii.  North American records of the Small Heath, C. pamphilus are apparently erroneous, this being strictly an Old World species.  As one further slight complication, the butterfly known in the UK as The Ringlet is a quite different species, in a different genus altogether, Aphantopus.