1969] 
Burns — Skipper Butterfly 
385 
Fig. 2. The sleeping female of fig. 1 pinned and spread at a later time. 
Dorsal view. Her wingspread is about 38 mm. 
The sleeping position of E. brizo , unlike that of various butter- 
flies, affords little to no protection from weather; the skipper is 
exposed, but it is concealed visually from many potential predators. 
The cryptic posture is assumed so abruptly that a fast-moving skipper 
almost vanishes into a more or less static landscape. 
A different but related cryptic orientation has been observed in 
England in E. tages (Linnaeus), a species that was grouped with 
E. brizo in subgenus Erynnis by Burns (1964: 22-28). Sleeping 
individuals of E. tages characteristically rest appressed to flower- 
heads of forbs, grasses, and rushes. As in E. brizo , the wings are 
roofed noctuid-style over the abdomen and distally tend to be wrapped 
around the sleeping substrate. The flower-heads chosen are gen- 
erally dead and brown and hence closely similar in color to the 
skippers themselves (Trimen 1857; Frohawk 1884, 1899, [1924] : 
159-161; Tutt 1905-1906: 288-289; Ford 1945: pi. XIV, fig. 4). 
Acknowledgements 
I thank Douglas A. Graham for his prescience in bringing a flash- 
equipped Brownie camera to Texas and for using it to take the 
photographs that appear in fig. 1. Barry I. Kiefer kindly printed 
these photographs and Spencer J. Berry mounted them. This re- 
search was supported by National Science Foundation grant GB 5935. 
