1969] 
Burns — Skipper Butterfly 
383 
folding its wings rooflike over its abdomen in the manner of many 
moths. The primaries fully covered the secondaries, and the apices 
of the primaries extended to the dorsolateral surfaces of the branch. 
In E. brizo the upper sides of the brown primaries are partly over- 
scaled with gray — especially distad. As a result, the skipper blended 
with the branch and literally looked like “a bump on a log.” 
The speed with which the skipper took up its sleeping position is 
reminiscent of a rapidly flying female of Hesperia uncas macswaini 
MacNeill seen at 3170 meters in the White Mountains, Mono 
County, California, by MacNeill (1964: 38): “With no apparent 
hesitation it turned and disappeared into the eastern side of a dense 
Artemisia bush. Immediate investigation revealed the insect sitting 
with closed wings four inches within the tangle of terminal twigs 
and leaves. At first gentle, then vigorous disturbance of that portion 
of the shrub evoked no visible response upon the part of the insect. 
The specimen was captured by vigorously tapping the main branch, 
causing it to fall into an open container.” Unlike this Hesperia 
female, however, the E. b. brizo male did not become torpid at once 
(the late afternoon was warm and rather sunny, with thin high 
cloud) ; it energetically flew off when I tried to bottle it a minute or 
so after it had lit. I followed for several minutes and about two 
hundred meters before losing it. In this interval the skipper seemed 
at times to investigate briefly other low dead branches. 
In juniper and scrub oak habitat on the north rim of Palo Duro 
Canyon, 24 kilometers south of Claude, Armstrong County, Texas, 
on 12 April 1968, at 1625 hours C.S.T., a flying female of E. brizo 
burgessi (Skinner) that I was pursuing suddenly settled on a gray 
branch of a small Quercus mohriana shrub that was barely beginning 
to leaf out. The branch was about a third of a meter above the 
ground and nearly parallel to it. The skipper lit on the dorsal side 
of the branch and at once assumed a mothlike posture as described 
above, except that the primaries scarcely embraced the branch. The 
afternoon was warm but cloudy at this time; and though the sun 
shone brightly again later and though some individuals in the pop- 
ulation kept active, this female remained quiet. When she was 
photographed after almost an hour, her only move had been a ninety- 
degree rotation from the top to the side of the branch (fig. 1). She 
was torpid and was bottled as soon as photographs were taken. 
These two strikingly similar observations — made one year and 
665 kilometers apart on both sexes and two of the three major dif- 
ferentiates of polytypic species E. brizo (treated in detail by Burns 
