7th Annual Texas Butterfly Festival, Mission, Texas, October 2002

In addition to tours and talks for butterfly-watchers, the festival features lots of programming for local residents and especially school kids.  Here are some of the participants who dressed up in butterfly costumes for a contest.

Residents of Mission, Texas volunteer to drive vans, organize, and put on the festival together with the Mission Chamber of Commerce and sponsors suck as Eagle Optics.  Here are some residents and volunteers going through the garden where I took the photo of the Red-bordered Pixie.

Below is a Sickle-winged Skipper.  This species was fairly common, and could often be seen perched on the ground.  At left is a digital picture in natural light, at right a scanned image from a 35 mm slide, with flash.

Left: Black light set up to attract insects at Bentsen Rio Grande Valley State Park.  Lots of moths, plus other interesting insects, including a webspinner (Embioptera), an earwig (Dermaptera), an ant lion (Neuroptera: Myrmeleontidae), green lacewing (Neuroptera: Chrysopidae), a dragonfly (Odonata: Aeshnidae: Anax junius), a robber fly (Diptera: Asilidae), a number of Hemiptera (true bugs), Homoptera (plant hoppers), Diptera (two-winged flies), and Hymenoptera (various wasps), as well as Coleoptera (beetles) and Ephemeroptera (mayflies).  Another neuropteran that was present in numbers of several to a dozen or so was the mantidfly (Neuroptera: Mantispidae).  Here are some pictures of them on the sheet at the black light and of pinned specimens:

A number of the dragonflies that occur in south Texas are tropical ones that reach their northern limits in the LRGV.  Here are a few of them:

Left:  Brachymesia furcata, the Red-tailed Pennant.  It occurs across the border region of the southwest and in the tip of Florida.  The male has a red abdomen and the female usually has a yellowish one.  this female and another specimen taken at Anzalduas County Park both had red abdomens.  The bar in the scans is 1 cm long.

Right: A female Roseate Skimmer, Orthemis ferruginea.  Occurs mostly in the southern part of the US, and has been recorded as far north as Kansas in the Great Plains.

Left: The Eastern Ringtail, Erpetogomphus designatus, occurs through much of the southeastern US, as far west as NM and CO.  This is a male.

Right: A male Black Setwing (Dythemis nigrescens).  Other Setwings that occur in the US include the Swift and Checkered Setwings (which also occur in Kansas), and the Mayan Setwing, which has been recorded in the US only in the Big Bend region of Texas.

Here is a common damselfly, Rambur's Forktail (Ischnura ramburii):

There were more Snouts between San Antonio and the Rio Grande River than you can imagine.  They were so thick as we drove south from San Antonio that our windshield and radiator were covered with Snout remains after only 30 miles or so of travel.  Here are some pictures of Snouts that we took alongside a gravel road in Live Oak County.

Another favorite southern butterfly is one that occasionally also appears in Kansas, the Gulf Fritillary (Left below):

Here is a south-Texas specialty, the Texan Crescent (Right):

This is an Elada Checkerspot:   

Another species that also occurs in Kansas is the Funereal Duskywing (Right):  

A very lovely, and elegant butterfly is the White Peacock (Left below):

And, as a final example, here is the Bordered Patch: