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Butterflies

I Brake for Butterflies...

"I Brake for Butterflies"

Today, from coast to coast, people out in the field with binoculars in warm weather are just as likely to be butterflyers as birders. If you haven't tried this growing hobby yet, a fascinating world of beauty and behavior beckons you.

By Kenn Kaufman





At first glance it seems a typical scene of birdwatchers in action. One April morning at Audubon's Kern River Preserve in southern California, on a brushy flat uphill from some cottonwood groves, a dozen of us are closing in on our quarry. Our binoculars are at the ready, and even the dialogue sounds familiar: "I've got a good view from over here," says the young woman to my left. "What are the field marks again?" asks the man behind me. Obviously, we're pursuing a bird, right?

Look again. Those binoculars are pointed down, not up, and we watchers are arranged in a ragged ring only a few yards across. Suddenly the object of our attention takes off and flies, fluttering a few feet to land on the leaf of a saltbush. The tiny butterfly's wings are less than half an inch long, with soft lilac on the upper side and a flare of orange toward the edges. The San Emigdio blue we see is a prized sighting because it flies for only a few weeks in spring at a few spots in the California interior. We, the watchers, are locked in, reveling in a hobby that is soaring in popularity: butterflying.

For many people, the suggestion of such a hobby still conjures up images of sterile boxes filled with neatly spread and pinned specimens. Indeed, most of our current knowledge of butterflies is based on the work of collectors, stretching back to at least the 18th century. But the new focus on butterfly watching has some advantages. First, it's a lot easier: Collecting and preparing specimens requires substantial amounts of time and gear, while watching requires little of either. Butterflying is easier to share, too: Only one member of a group of collectors can take home a prized specimen, but dozens of watchers can enjoy a rare sighting—sometimes over and over again. And watchers don't risk running afoul of insect-rights activists. In retrospect it seems this pastime's development was inevitable.


The author, an inveterate birder, started looking for butterflies at 13. Since then, he has found them all over, from woods to fields to cities.
Photograph by Chip Simons

Statistics on participation are difficult to come by, although, of course, this is true for all fields of natural history. After all, no one knows for sure how many birders there are. We butterflyers are even harder to count, but by all indications, we're increasing. Local and regional butterfly clubs are popping up all over North America; butterfly festivals are drawing hundreds of participants in some areas; butterfly gardens are becoming de rigueur in parks, refuges, and other public spaces. Audubon chapters from coast to coast are now running field trips to look for butterflies as well as birds (see "Butterflying Basics," right). Summer butterfly counts, modeled on Audubon's Christmas Bird Count, are held in more than 400 localities across the United States and Canada, with more added every year. When naturalists quip that "butterflies are the new birds," they're not entirely joking.

The new birds, indeed. This growing trend has an oddly familiar ring for me, because I had a preview of it when I was a boy, entering my teens. Although birds had captured my imagination when I was 6, converting me into an obsessed young birder, I did not begin to look for smaller winged creatures until I turned 13. Up to that time, I (like most Americans) had been utterly unaware of most butterflies. Sure, I might have noticed big swallowtails or monarchs sailing over the city parks in Wichita, my hometown, but certainly not the delta-winged little grass skippers, which, like tiny orange fighter jets, sat poised for takeoff on grass blades. I had never noticed the brown wood-satyrs or wood-nymphs flopping along through forest shadows, nor the nickel-size hairstreaks or blues, rubbing their wings rhythmically as they imbibed from flower heads of clover. I had totally missed the hackberry emperors and question marks around the riverside groves, landing on tree trunks and then zooming away with wing flicks and quick glides. But once I began to look for butterflies, they were everywhere. Throughout the warmer months I prowled the woods and fields, intoxicated by surprise after surprise. I began keeping a life list of butterflies, trying to find as many species as possible in a day—an experience akin to starting birding all over again.

There was a catch, though, because I wasn't catching butterflies. All the books I found, even field guides, showed butterflies as they appeared when pinned and spread in a collection. But I wasn't collecting; all I wanted to do was identify them in the wild. Unfortunately, translating illustrations of dead specimens in books into live ones in nature often proved extremely challenging. I failed so frequently that many of the things I saw remained mysteries. In that era, at the end of the 1960s, there just weren't many resources for the butterfly enthusiast who wasn't a collector.


Gulf fritillary.

Photograph by Martin Garwood/NHPA

Since then, of course, the field has undergone a complete metamorphosis, thanks largely to Robert Michael Pyle. Now an internationally renowned conservationist, biologist, and prize-winning author, Pyle is also revered by his peers as "the father of butterfly watching." He modestly downplays his role. "I was fortunate to be at the butterfly–birding interface, at a time when few people were," Pyle says. As a boy in Colorado, he had been an active butterfly collector, but after starting college in Washington, he fell in with the birders of the Seattle Audubon Society. "Becoming an ardent birder, and learning those techniques, had a big influence on me," he recalls. In 1970, as an experiment, Pyle led a butterfly-watching walk for Seattle Audubon. None of the participants had ever looked at butterflies before, but by the end of the walk, most of them were hooked. Pyle soon realized there was tremendous potential for butterfly watching if people could be convinced to try it. In 1971 he founded the Xerces Society (named for the extinct Xerces blue butterfly) for the conservation of butterflies and other invertebrates. In 1975 he and the other leaders of Xerces started the summer butterfly counts that are still going strong today.

But the biggest impact came from Pyle's Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Butterflies, published in 1981. This book, which featured hundreds of photographs of live butterflies in the wild, was, in my opinion, the first true field guide available. In 1984, when Pyle followed up with The Handbook for Butterfly Watchers, all the elements were in place for a revolution.

The movement has been picking up steam ever since. During the 1990s Paul Opler updated both the eastern and western Peterson guides to butterflies to make them more field-friendly; Jeff Glassberg launched his Butterflies Through Binoculars series; and Glassberg and a group of enthusiasts formed the North American Butterfly Association, the first organization to pointedly exclude collecting from its stated interests. Today, in many regions, people out in the field with binoculars in warm weather are just as likely to be butterflyers as birders.

Those who branch out from birding to butterflying sometimes expect it to be exactly the same. It isn't. I had plenty of occasion to think about that recently when, after finishing a field guide to North American birds, I immediately launched into a guide to butterflies in exactly the same format. My coauthor, lepidopterist Jim Brock, had to keep reining me in, in a good-natured way: "Excuse me, but if I may remind you, butterflies are not birds."

He's right. Every North American bird species can be recognized in the field at least part of the time. But some of our butterflies simply can't be named on sight. Identification of some of the duskywings, checkered-skippers, and blues, among others, remains the exclusive province of the person wielding a net. Birds in North America have been thoroughly classified, but butterflies unknown to science are still being discovered, even in the United States, which adds another layer of uncertainty when one is trying to identify an odd individual. Also unlike birds, few butterflies engage in regular migrations. Arctic-nesting birds may wing off to Argentina for the winter, but butterflies that hatch in the high Arctic stay there, surviving through the long winters under the snow as partly grown caterpillars. Some butterflies do move around: I have witnessed massive flights of lyside sulphurs and of painted ladies, probably involving millions of individuals on one-way emigrations that were never followed by a return flight. There are even some butterflies that migrate north in spring and south in fall, such as the monarch and a few others—although each flight usually involves a different generation. But most butterflies are sedentary, and many have small ranges or short flight seasons, or both. To see a Gillett's checkerspot on the wing, for example, you must go to a limited area of the Rockies during a few weeks in the early summer; to see a Huachuca giant-skipper, you must go to a single Arizona mountain range in the fall. There are dozens more examples like that, all conspiring to compound butterflying's challenges.

Perhaps the hardest adjustment for a birder is just accepting the difference in scale. Butterflies are, above all, smaller than birds. Of the more than 700 butterflies that have been found north of Mexico, well over half fall into the small-to-tiny category, measuring less than an inch and a half from wingtip to wingtip—a mere fraction of the size of the smallest hummingbird. Time after time I have taken people into their own gardens and shown them butterflies they had never noticed before: tiny crescents with intricate filigree patterns of black on orange; rusty little skippers, inconspicuous at rest, lightning fast in flight; subtle gray hairstreaks, the trailing edges of their wings adorned with eyelike spots and false antennae, so convincing that an attacking bird is apt to grab at the wrong end of the butterfly and get nothing but a few scales.

Adjusting to these creatures' smaller scale rewards observers with a whole new perspective on habitats, as well. Key habitats for butterflies are often smaller than those for birds, and the requirements are often much more precise.

While some species are generalists, widespread in any open country, many butterflies are closely tied to specific plant communities. A number are even linked to particular species of plants, because their caterpillars will feed on no others. The little green Hessel's hairstreak, for example, lives only in swamps where its caterpillars can nibble on Atlantic white cedar; the desert elfin resides exclusively in the southern Great Basin, and only around stands of cliff rose. Thus the aspiring butterflyer must become a botanist, as well, attuned to the subtleties of habitat.

That attention to habitat and plants is even more crucial for butterfly conservation. The Xerces blue became extinct in the early 1940s for one reason: Its habitat was eaten up by the expansion of the city of San Francisco. When a population of a butterfly species disappears, habitat loss is almost always the cause. Of course, there are other threats. Insecticides undoubtedly kill many millions of butterflies annually. Other types of pollution may put butterflies at risk, too.

Still, owing to the relatively diminutive size of butterfly habitats, the best conservation efforts for butterflies are local ones. In southern California a pair of Audubon chapters have worked to protect two rare subspecies of blue butterflies. An innovative program of the Palos Verdes/South Bay chapter has involved local youth in saving the Palos Verdes blue (see "Green Teens Save the Blues," Audubon, September-October 1996). Los Angeles Audubon Society members have taken on interests as powerful as their city and its international airport to protect habitat for the El Segundo blue. "If it weren't for L.A. Audubon, the airport would have wiped out the largest of the last three remaining populations," says Herbert Clarke, who has been a chapter member for more than half a century. Not every Audubon chapter has an endangered species in its backyard, but many have found ways to work for butterfly conservation: restoring native prairie in the Twin Cities, for instance, or taking part in monarch surveys in Wichita and San Antonio. There are dozens of other examples from across the country (see The Auduboner).

Butterflying's growing popularity is proving crucial to saving habitat. These creatures are linchpins of ecotourism, and can inspire local chambers of commerce to appreciate their enormous economic value. Take southern Texas, home to dozens of tropical butterflies that occur nowhere else in the United States. Birders from across the country who had seen all of the south Texas bird specialties are now coming back, looking for new butterflies for their life lists. On a visit to Audubon's Sabal Palm Grove Sanctuary, near Brownsville, I talked to Jimmy Paz, the charismatic manager, about the butterfly garden installed there in 2001, which has become a huge tourist attraction. "Blue metalmarks, zebras—you name it, we got it," Paz told me. "The birders, they all come here at least once, but the butterfly people come back over and over."

Such development of butterfly tourism also plays a part in south-central California. Bob Barnes, the Kern River Preserve's manager, has spent years promoting the birding possibilities of the Kern River valley. Local hotel owners and other businesspeople have already seen the value of protecting bird habitat there. Now Barnes works with local experts to document the diverse butterflies of that region, and the butterflyers are arriving in increasing numbers for the chance to see leanira checkerspots, indra swallowtails, and, yes, San Emigdio blues. "You bet we're excited about the butterflies," says Barnes. "They give us that much more evidence of how important this region is." Sixty years ago, when the Xerces blue was erased from the planet, there simply was no group of butterflyers to rush to its defense. Any butterfly facing a similar fate today would be surrounded and supported by a phalanx of dedicated butterfly watchers.

Today, as our group enjoys the rare and exquisite San Emigdio blues fluttering about in the April breeze, I'm reminded of something Robert Michael Pyle told me: "It's gratifying to see so many people experiencing the kind of joy that butterflies have brought to me all my life," he said. "And I'm very encouraged that it provides a larger clientele for conservation."



Field editor Kenn Kaufman is author of the Kaufman Focus Guides series published by Houghton Mifflin, including Butterflies of North America.

Butterfly Basics

Butterflying Basics

Butterflies may be found almost anywhere in warm sunny weather. To find more, check concentrations of flowers (including small and "weedy" flowers that look unimpressive to humans) in meadows, gardens, marshes, roadsides, or forest edges. Look closely, since many butterflies are small and easily overlooked. Many are restricted to specific plant communities, so it pays to check a number of different habitats. Some butterflies don't come to flowers at all but may be attracted to rotting fruit or flowing sap. Others concentrate on wet mud at the edge of water, forming "puddle parties" that may number in the hundreds.

Many species of butterflies have short flight seasons and exist as adults for only a few weeks, surviving the rest of the year as eggs, caterpillars, or chrysalides. As a result, it is possible to go back to the same habitats repeatedly throughout the warmer months and find different combinations of butterflies each time.

The right kind of binoculars can be extremely helpful for seeing details on small butterflies. The specifications usually given for binoculars are the magnification (such as 7x or 8x) and the diameter of the objective (front) lenses, in millimeters. (Thus, 7x50 binoculars will be slightly less powerful than 8x32 binoculars but will let in a lot more light.)

For butterflyers the most important point is that binoculars must be able to focus in on near objects as well as those far away. If you purchase binoculars for butterflying, make sure they will focus down to at least seven feet.

For identifying butterflies on the spot in the wild, pick up a field guide that will fit easily in a pocket or day pack. Recommended titles: Robert Michael Pyle's Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Butterflies (Knopf, 1981); Peterson Field Guides: Eastern Butterflies, by Paul A. Opler (Houghton Mifflin, 1992), and Western Butterflies (1999); Butterflies Through Binoculars: The East, by Jeffrey Glassberg (Oxford University Press, 1999), and The West (2002); and Kaufman Focus Guides: Butterflies of North America, by Jim P. Brock and Kenn Kaufman (Houghton Mifflin, 2003).

More and more Audubon chapters are offering butterfly walks and programs (see The Auduboner). You can check butterflying at your local chapter by going to www.audubon.org/chapter/. To participate in a summer butterfly count, contact The North American Butterfly Association at www.naba.org. The Xerces Society works to conserve butterflies and other invertebrates; go to www.xerces.org.

—K.K.

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