Join us for a weekend of exciting field trips at Colville, Washington this summer! Timed at the peak of the season, June 28-30, this study weekend merges two great statewide butterfly events, the Annual NABA 4th of July Butterfly Count at Little Pend Oreille National Wildlife Refuge and one or two adventurous field days near Sherman Pass and the beautiful Kettle Crest, where logging roads wind through the Colville National Forest lands into forests and meadows explored by few lepidopterists. Wildlife Refuge biologist Mike Munts has coordinated the butterfly count at the refuge for seven years, and will provide an informative preparatory talk on the evening of Friday, the 28th, before our group splits into several field units to identify refuge species and tally individuals of each species seen. Saturday evening’s gathering will celebrate the butterflies we have found, and feature a silent auction, as has been our tradition in years previous. The evening will conclude with a keynote in which Chris Loggers, now recently retired as chief biologist for the Colville National Forests, will offer his reflections on the diverse habitats of the Kettle Range, and on his career working to track and conserve its pollinator species. There will be an optional trip day on Monday, July 1st, which may offer another look at Kettle Range butterflies, or a visit to scabland areas to the south in Lincoln County, where BLM biologists are working with WBA to catalogue some of the uncommon species at areas like Twin Lakes, Coffeepot Lakes or Upper Crab Creek. Best of all, this conference weekend will feature you all in sharing your knowledge and delight in Washington’s butterflies!
Friday night’s speaker will be Mike Munz of the Little Pend Oreille National Wildlife Refuge, previewing the area butterflies for us before we go out Saturday to count butterflies throughout the refuge. On Saturday our speaker will be Chris Loggers, recently retired from the Colville National Forest.
Chris Loggers began to depopulate his parents’ yard of leps as a 4-H member in Minnesota, wondering where the monarchs that dripped from their shelterbelt boxelder trees were headed in autumn, and relying on the Golden Guides as his sole source for insect identification. He left invertebrates in the 70s for the allure of the vertebrate world and spent 40 years as a vertebrate wildlife biologist for a variety of state and federal agencies and private organizations in the US and abroad. From 1991 until his retirement at the end of 2017, he worked as the wildlife biologist for the Colville National Forest, where he was the voice of the voiceless, assessing the effects of land management projects on about 30 species of wildlife and their habitats. He also initiated research or survey projects on a variety of species, some of which he will discuss tonight. He currently operates a small consulting business as he slides into true retirement.
He credits his renewed interest in invertebrates to WABA’s 2006 Study Weekend in Metaline Falls and especially Da- vid Nunnallee and Dennis Paulson. Since then, he initiated projects to document Western bumble bees, dragonflies, butterflies and moths in northeastern Washington. He wants to give a shout-out to the support and extremely tolerant replies he’s received to his questions from Jon Shepard, Jon Pelham, David James, and Nunnallee and Paulson, and to the financial support from Forest Service grants. He couldn’t have conducted the moth work without Jon Shepard’s identification skills nor most of the dragonfly and bumble bee work without the field help of Rick and often Sandy Moore and a league of Citizen Scientists who fed his biophilia.
Saturday’s talk “Discovering the Slightly Less-Forgotten Corner” will take you on a story tour of northeast Washington and some of the creatures that inhabit it.