Skippers & Dragonflies

Plate No. 01 Butterflies in plain clothes

The Skippers

Family Hesperiidae

Small, stocky, big-eyed butterflies with a darting flight that gave them their name. Real pollinators, and the fastest-growing section of New Jersey's watch list.

A skipper is what most people dismiss as a moth: stout body, folded wings, brown and gold instead of monarch orange. Look closer and the field mark is the antennae, which end in little hooked clubs no moth has. They work flowers hard all season, carrying pollen from bloom to bloom the same way any butterfly does, just without the fan club.

The reason they are on this site is the list they are filling. New Jersey recently listed or uplisted a wave of butterflies, and skippers dominate it: the common roadside-skipper, dotted skipper, Leonard's skipper, pepper-and-salt skipper, and two-spotted skipper, alongside the Acadian hairstreak, gray comma, Georgia satyr, hoary elfin, northern metalmark, and silver-bordered fritillary. The checkered white and frosted elfin moved onto the endangered list, and the monarch is proposed for federal threatened status.

Why skippers in particular? Their caterpillars mostly eat grasses and sedges, the native warm-season kind that once covered old fields and Pine Barrens edges. Mow it all, treat it all, or lose it to development, and the skippers go with it, quietly, one tidy lawn at a time.

Photo: Rhododendrites, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

What they are	True butterflies, family Hesperiidae
Field mark	Hooked clubs on the antennae
Caterpillar food	Mostly native grasses and sedges
Pollinator?	Yes, all season long
NJ status	Five skippers newly listed or uplisted

Plate No. 02 Not a pollinator. Still on our side.

The Air Patrol

Dragonflies, suborder Anisoptera

Dragonflies visit no flowers and carry no pollen. We put them on a pollinator site anyway, and here is the honest case for it.

A dragonfly is a carnivore from start to finish. It begins as an underwater predator, hunting in ponds and slow water for months to years before it climbs a stem and becomes the fastest insect in the yard. The adult takes mosquitoes, gnats, and midges out of the air over your garden all day, dozens upon dozens of them, on wings that have been doing this for more than three hundred million years.

So why here? Because the same choices protect both. The barrier spray sold to kill mosquitoes kills the dragonflies that were already killing mosquitoes, along with the bees and caterpillars next door. Clean, unsprayed water and standing native plants raise dragonflies; poisoned water raises nothing. A yard managed for pollinators gets its air patrol free, and New Jersey has more than 180 dragonfly and damselfly species ready to take the job. Watch for the blue dasher, the common whitetail, and the eastern pondhawk, our reliable three.

Dragonflies are also honest witnesses. Their young cannot live in dirty water, so a pond with dragonflies rising from it is a pond that passed inspection.

Photo: gailhampshire, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Flowers pollinated	Zero. They earn their keep another way
Diet	Mosquitoes, gnats, midges, on the wing
Young	Underwater predators, months to years
In the fossil record	More than 300 million years
NJ regulars	Blue dasher, common whitetail, eastern pondhawk