Watching Washington Butterflies with Bob Pyle: Number Twenty Three

Part Three: The Second Expedition

Reviewing, both Ray Stanford and Charles Rogers had made convincing autumn sightings of Hackberry Emperors along the Snake River in southeastern Washington near the Oregon border. In Part I (August 2013), I reviewed the butterfly’s range and natural history, and set up the challenge. As Part II (November 2013) ended, David Branch and I had retreated from deepest Asotin County into driving snow, having enjoyed a fine October field trip with lots of butterflies, while making no progress in confirming the species’ occurrence in the state. This year, I resolved to return in the season of the Hackberries’ accustomed flight during summers of my youth in Colorado. I hadn’t reckoned on it being the hottest, driest summer on record.

Starting from Clarkston on July 3rd, I neared the habitat at 10:30 A.M. South of Captain John’s Rapid, small seeps off the cliffs with Teasel and White Sweet- clover proffered just a lone Gray Hairstreak and a Cabbage White. The rocky shoreline of the Snake, flowery and full of puddles last fall, was an arid alkaline line of bony white above the water. At Heller’s Bar, the river itself thrummed with dozens of big-engine watercraft of fishermen and holiday boaters seeking the cool of the water. I made my getaway from the noisy, smelly fleet by turning up the Grande Ronde River. This confluence was where my party found the first (and still only) Dainty Sulphurs in the state, in August of 1975. Forty years! I couldn’t believe it.

My objective was a substantial grove of mature Net-leaved Hackberry trees across the dusty, stony road from the Grande Ronde River, a mile above the Snake, not far below the bridge over to the private riverside settlement of Rogersburg and the steep little jeep road to Oregon. I’d spotted this grove with David, and thought it looked just right for Asterocampa celtis. Used as a hunters camp, it had a fire circle in the middle, and gave good shade from the hot and heightening sun. There was no nectar, but Hackberry Butterflies don’t come to flowers much anyway, if at all. But they love noxious substances, so I had been working on a bait for them all year. Now, at noon, I took out my special preparation: rotted blackberries and bananas, months-old oyster and clam juice, stale beer, and several other disgusting ingredients. I missed a bet by failing to stop and gather in a fresh rattlesnake roadkill that morning, but I did collect and employ some still-moist road apples from cattle foraging on slim pickings. After spreading these delights on log and stone and trunk and stump, I anointed them with the ever-popular uric acid, and then sat back to watch the butterflies flood in, powerless to resist my bait’s olfactory draw.

And it really was like that! Within ten seconds of opening the bottle that I poured over the trunks, a Red Admirable popped up and perched until I’d finished before imbibing. Within one minute, a worn, bird-struck Large Wood Nymph appeared and took up a perch on the smelly bark. Both of these, and others of their kinds, remained all afternoon. But the bait-loving Hackberries did not deign to accept my sweet offerings. It was a problem that the liquids tended to evaporate in no time, and the solids (cut oranges, overripe bananas) dried out too soon, diminishing their ability to broadcast volatile scent. It was another problem that the temperature hit, then exceeded, 100 degrees Fahrenheit. And before long, I found it obligatory to retreat from my stifling grove to the cool, refreshing riffles of the Grande Ronde.

In that oven, the river was heaven. And there were butterflies: Woodland and Colorado Skippers, Mylitta Crescents, Purplish Coppers, Orange Sulphurs, and a big female each of Lorquin’s Admiral and Viceroy (I have caught a hybrid between the two species here before). Most interestingly, I came upon a colony of tiny Acmon Blues, associated with Twin Clover along the streamside; a few thousand yards from where we’d found the autumn brood on Snow Buckwheat. But on the whole there were far fewer species and individuals than in October 2013. The great heat seemed to be draining life out of the butterflies almost as much as out of me.

But I was revived by the extravagance of life attracted and allowed by this little river. Along with the flurries of whirligig beetles, there were thousands of pairs of bluet damselflies of at least two species, some in hoop, but most positioned with the females laying eggs in the submergent vegetation, accompanied by the protective males still clasping them behind their heads. Then there came along a spectacular big pair of Green Darner dragonflies, our state insect, in the same posture but in flight. And as if they weren’t sexy enough, as I emerged from a wade onto a tiny beach, I spotted at one end of it an enormous fat pair of Western Toads in happy amplexus. Golly, did they look content and complacent! Turkeys and deer came down to drink, and there were otter tracks.

Late in the afternoon, the day cooling just a little, I walked back and forth along the county road downstream from Heller Bar, above the canopy of the Hackberry forest that lines the Snake River here. This is where Charles Rogers had his sighting. Viewing conditions were perfect. But all I saw were hundreds of big, handsome orb weavers and their webs strung from bough to bough, and whole families of insect-hawking Say’s Phoebes: from both of which I deduce that the predation rate for butterflies here could be formidable. Nor could I see any evidence of the feeding damage characteristic of Hackberry larvae, or the caterpillars themselves, or their chrysalides. Both of these stages are beautiful and cryptic, but distinctive when one has the search image, as I still do from great Hackberry hunting in my boyhood neighborhood. As the evening song of the Canyon Wren began to climb the hot bas- alt walls, I withdrew to Asotin for the night, to cool off at last and make plans for a renewed search the next morning.

Came the Fourth of July, and an even crazier scene around the boat launch at Heller Bar. Once again, my Hackberry grove up the tributary was a quiet oasis. And then came the first really promising event in this whole enterprise to date. As I was investigating a probable Common Sootywing along the dusty track between the grove and the river, a butterfly appeared around the edge of a large Hackberry occupied by a Lazuli Bunting in full throat. It ducked into the foliage for a moment, then emerged again, and zoomed off across the road and the dry steppe toward a big stand of Hackberries in the rimrock and broken flow of the canyon walls to the north. I got one decent look at the ventrum in fast flight past me, at maybe ten feet. Definitely a nymphalid, it looked purply-tan-the right color, size, and flight pattern for a male Hackberry Emperor. The only other candidates I could imagine were a dull Buckeye (also never collected in the state, though seen and photographed last year), or an even duller Painted Lady. But the “jiz” I got (as the birders say) was definitely that of a Hackberry Butterfly.

And so, thus encouraged, I retreated from the torrid canyon of the Snake, up Couse Creek, to the long, steep Sherry Grade, past Oregon Swallowtails, and finally up into the green hay, wheat, and pines of the Anatone plateau, where great numbers of Horned Larks and Western Meadowlarks harvested an outbreak of grasshoppers. Then way down to cross the Grande Ronde far upstream from where I’d been, and way back up, and on into Oregon. In the following week, I would spot twenty-five species of butterflies on the Zumwalt Prairie of Wallowa County; and then twenty in Klickitat County on my way home. But it was that one purply-brown flash on the Fourth of July that really got me excited, and made the whole trip worthwhile.

I also learned, from a Snake River authority I met in Wallowa, that the site of Ray Stanford’s original encounter with a Hackberry Butterfly that landed on him at a jet-boat rest area opposite China Garden Landing, was actually in Oregon- not Washington! (It’s so close to the unmarked border that it was very difficult for Ray to tell which state he was actually in.) So we now have putative sightings from both Washington and Oregon, as well as obscure records from Idaho, across the river. If the population is in fact there, it must be in very small numbers so far. But I feel we are closing in- and I will be back next year! I hope it won’t be so darned hot.

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