Backyard and Beyond

Rare to see an Eastern Tailed-blue open like this.
Male Monarch with bent wing. Very origami, but still eating.
Quite a year for skippers.
Spicebush Swallowtail with close-up field mark: the Federation of Planets blue-ish wedge between bottom two and the third inner orange spots. Compare with:
The orange boulder wall of the Black Swallowtail.
And a new species for me. The Common Checkered-Skipper’s common name suggests its commonness across its North American range, but I’ve never spotted one before. Rare for NYC: a couple iNaturalist reports for both Governor’s and Ward’s Islands; several in The Bronx; one in Queens; none on Staten Island. This is the first iNaturalist record for Brooklyn, and the 36th butterfly species on my Kings County list. Beautiful inner wings hinted at above… but my battery ran out just then! By the time I reloaded, it was gone. Unlike the clouds of Tawny-edged Skippers around this intensely perfumed buddleia that flutter up like in a casting call for Garcia Marquez when a truck rumbles by and then settle right back down again in the sugar when the truck is gone.