11 V 2014 – Hubert K. McBee Memorial Park near Alsea Falls, OR

Hubert K. McBee Memorial Park is along South Fork Rd, South of Alsea on the way to Alsea Falls. It’s a small park that allows day use as well as over night camping. The south fork of the Alsea River runs right through the middle of the park and the campsites are settled right up along it’s banks. A couple of the sites have huge picnic tables that would seat around 50 people. I ate lunch at one of them by myself. Not entirely by myself. I had a firefly lunch buddy (Coleoptera: Lampyridae) who didn’t want to eat any of my triscuit. This species of lampyrid doesn’t light up, but is in the same family as bioluminescent ones out east.

I had visited this site way back when I began as a student at OSU and was enrolled in Aquatic Entomology, instructed by David Lytle. This park is very good for insect collecting. I found at least 3 of the species that I was looking for, as well as some that I didn’t expect to see. The water was bright and clear enough that you could watch caddisfly larvae walking around (I promise I’ll do a post about aquatic insects someday; it’s a whole other world in a river).

 Upon parking at one of the sites, I came across a lot of butterflies that were hanging out on the ground. They were lapping up water from the mud. This behavior is known as puddling. Adult butterflies will drink water from the ground, from carrion, or from animal urine and absorb the minerals within it. Because it’s the minerals they are after and not the water, they quickly pass and excrete the water. This paper from Stanford goes into more detail about puddling and competition that might be involved in this behavior. I’ve been told that some entomologists will pee on the ground to try to induce butterflies to puddle. I didn’t have to do that in this case, however there were a lot of beer cans in the garbage from the weekend, so I supposed there’s a chance that I was rolling around in someone’s urine to get these pictures.

These butterflies are part of the family Lycaenidae. I asked Paul Hammond at Oregon State University (the man who re-discovered the endangered Fender’s Blue Butterfly in Oregon) what he thought they might be based only the area, the time of year and the behavior – no picture –  and he suggested Celastrina ladon. However, I’ve not had a positive ID. Until then, please enjoy the video of puddling below.

 

Here’s a bonus picture of a weevil because I see a ton of them all of the time!