Wildlife Watching Wednesday: The Tiny Least Skipper Butterfly

By: Tom Berg

Skipper butterflies are very small, and the Least Skipper is certainly one of the smallest of the skippers.  Least Skippers, also called Least Skipperlings, have a wingspan of only three-quarters of an inch to one inch.  Their tiny wings are mostly orange, often with a very dark, almost black border.  Their body is somewhat slender and their antennae is checkered with alternating light and dark stripes.

Least Skippers are frequently called “grass skippers” because they inhabit grasslands and because the skipper caterpillars eat grass as their main food.  Least Skippers usually fly just above the grass in an almost leisurely fashion, searching for mates or looking for small flowers where they can feed.  Some of the flowers preferred by them include thistle, swamp milkweed, swamp verbena and different species of clover.

Female Least Skippers lay their miniscule eggs one at a time on individual blades of grass, and as mentioned above, the caterpillars of these butterflies use blades of grass as food.  The caterpillars create a tubular shelter by weaving together two adjacent blades of grass with tiny strands of silk.  The caterpillars stay relatively safe from predators while feeding on the grass blades inside their homemade shelters.

The Least Skipper ranges from the Great Plains eastward, all the way to the East Coast.  They live in the vast grasslands of southern Canada, too.  Since these skippers love grass and damp grasslands, they can be found in meadows, wetlands, marshes, roadside ditches and grassy streamsides.  Unlike most skipper species where the males rest in a prominent spot of their home territory and wait for a female to fly by, Least Skipper males fly along the tops of the grass, actively searching for females.

As Least Skipper caterpillars mature, they form a tiny chrysalis inside their protective leaf shelter where they have been feeding.  They finish maturing inside the chrysalis and go through metamorphosis, just like all butterflies.  When they emerge from the chrysalis they are a beautiful orange-colored butterfly, ready to complete the cycle once more!

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