Common Buckeye
Junonia coenia · Butterflies
Common Buckeye
Salt Marsh, 24 August 2019
A Common Buckeye basking with wings flat to the sun on the path through the salt marsh, which is where you usually find one: on bare ground and gravel rather than flowers. It is a butterfly of open country across the southern United States that pushes north each summer as far as New England and can't survive the winter there, so every Brooklyn buckeye is an immigrant or its child.
The eyespots are a decoy rather than decoration. A bird strikes at the false "head" on the wing margin and the butterfly gets away having lost only a scrap of wing.
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