Hardest to net ?

Papilio glaucus at the wrong time of the day/year. I hate it when they don't come down to the ground.

I got a few Anaea andria using a net. You can sneak up on them. That didn't compare to Charaxes jasius in Europe when you only have a net.

Hands down Anaea andria for me are the hardest to net. I've missed way more than I've netted.

I am absolutely positive that John Hyatt will agree with me 100%. Chlorostrymon maesites. In 1972(??) we journeyed to the Florida Keys to collect Lepidoptera. We visited the Old Botanical Garden on Stock Island, the last Key before Key West.
To truly appreciate the list of Hairstreaks we collected from the tops of tree with extension net 30 to 40 feet in length. You had to be there.

There was a strip joint with young ladies and a total lack of clothing.

What a collecting trip. John Hyatt, your turn to speak up. Who stepped on the dead Porpoises?

Speaking of only netting, I have six real tough ones. I realize some are best caught w bait, but the question was for the netting of.

Butterflies........
Junonia evarete nigrosuffusa,........fast, lands on ground and is very weary
Eunica tatila,.......lands on 1-2” wide tree trunks which is hard to sneak up on and one has to double net from front and behind trunk
Phoebis philea,....fast and flies high only occasionally landing on flowers
Hypaurotis crysalus,......flies fast and high able to be brought down only with a purple flag
Marpesia petreus.........in any good condition prior to or after netting.

Moths.......
tapping for Catocala atocala........hard to sneak up to and is fast and weary/tough to follow if disturbed.

I feel that "generally speaking" amongst butterflies most Nymphalidae
as a family are the most difficult to "net". Without the use of baits
(whichever one you may use); they nearly always are the most wary of
butterflies.

In my personal experiences with the net I have found Eurytides marcellus,
Phoebis philea and Phoebis sennae all to be of unusual difficulty in securing
a capture.

Heck, I have even had some tough times attempting to net Question marks, Comma's,
and Red-spotted Purples specifically. And they have a times "won" the battle and
lived to fly another day !

Leroy's memory is basically correct - he was with the group on Stock Island when the Chlorostrymon maesites were flying only in
the treetops. Somewhere I have a 35mm slide of Dave Baggett or somebody with one of the immensely tall extension nets we had.

The dead porpoise episode was on the way back to TN from the Keys. Near Darien, GA we stopped to collect in a tidal marsh where the rare skippers
Problema bulenta and Euphyes dukesi were flying, along with a vast horde of Poanes viator. One had to wade to take specimens off the blooming pickerel weed, and
while totally focused on a distant skipper, I stepped smack dab in the middle of a rotted dead baby porpoise. Unbelievable stench! My boots were a discard, and
the jeans I had on came home with the end of the legs flapping outside the trunk of the car. Missed the skipper, too.

Another tough bug for me to net: Oeneis jutta. The one time I encountered them, they were landing only on small evergreen trunks, and the limb growth was so
thick that getting a net near them was impossible. Getting a little series took a huge amount of work.

Cheers,
jh

777,

The "common mestra" is in fact very common in the southern part of TX (LRGV up to San Antonio, even Austin on occasion). They are slow, lazy fliers & easy to capture. The wings are very delicate, so you need to catch lots of them in order to get a few good specimens.