Well, eight years after my trip to Fraser's Hill, I finally got around to editing the few butterfly photos I took. It was mostly cloudy during my visit and I was busy with birds so I didn't get many butterfly photos. But I got nice shots of this beautiful little rufous grass skipper with white spots in the yard at Stephen's Place. During the past few weeks I've been getting more experience with iNaturalist and after searching, the best identification I could come up with was the not uncommon "Chestnut Bob" (Iambrix salsala). They have such fun common names for butterflies in the Old World! I was not happy with the ID as the wing shape and the placement of the spots were a bit off but I entered the record into iNat anyway.
Then to the rescue comes Aaron Soh aka Atronox! Aaron is a young naturalist from somewhere in SE Asia with not a lot of records in iNaturalist but with an amazing 117,000 identification verifications. He has recently been cleaning up a few of my misIDs and he found my little grass skipper is actually Zenonoida eltola. So I looked this taxon up in iNaturalist and and shocked to see only five other records.... Period! On the whole damn plant! Mine is the second for Malaysia with the first being not far from Fraser's Hill. There is one record from Thailand and three from Taiwan.
Of course these are just the only iNat photo records. There are actually quite a few records as lepidopterists have been studying the area for many years. Here's the page for Zononoidea eltola from the website Butterflies in Indo-China.
Well that was fun! This one is called the Tailed Judy.
The Yellow Glassy Tiger.
I think this is Aurivittia aurivittata.
Two species of Euploea, tulliolus and mulciber.
I've entered over found hundred species of butterflies from eight countries into iNaturalist as I write this. Having access to expert naturalist around the world is pretty cool!
