This small
skipper has rounded wings and a blackish upperside. Males lack a
stigma. Both sexes have a row of orange patches across the hindwing
upperside, smaller and sometimes almost absent in males. Males
usually have tiny orange spots near the forewing tip, and the
females have larger white spots in the same area, on both the upper
and underside. In the centre of the hindwing underside there is a
yellow area made up of a long central streak with two small yellow
patches on each side. Wingspan: 22 to 29 mm.
Abundance:
The Mulberry Wing tends to be extremely local but can be common
within colonies.
Flight
Season: Poanes massasoit flies from early July to early August, but
is most common in mid-July. There is one generation throughout the
range
Habits: This
species is restricted to patches of narrow-leafed sedges. With
practice these are easy to find and recognize, even in the winter,
and are almost always on wet roadsides, and usually no more than 50
metres long, although not all such patches have skipper colonies.
The skippers never fly outside the sedge patches and only rarely
above the tops of the plants; their normal flight is down in
between the stems of the sedges, very slow and weak even when
alarmed.
