Watching Washington Butterflies with Bob Pyle: Number Twenty Six

My hackberry henchman, Dr. David Branch, and I reckoned we were closing in this time. As I’d hoped, it wasn’t quite as hot as last year, even a little cloudy with a dash of rain-going-back-to-sun-&-swelter-in short, perfect butterfly weather. And there we were, “camped” for the day in my favorite hackberry grove, a little way up the Grand Ronde River from its confluence with the Snake at Heller Bar: the very place I thought I might have seen a hackberry butterfly in flight near the end of the last try, a year ago. We’d laid out a seductive array of bait: a sponge soaked with ancient, turned Riesling; mashed overripe bananas; anchovies rottening in the baking sun; and a nice fresh road-killed rattlesnake. If a Hackberry Emperor didn’t come to this mess, either it wasn’t in the vicinity, or it had a bad cold.

Asterocampa celtis belongs to a group of butterflies that prefer disgusting substances to sweet nectar. The fine British writer Patrick Barkham, in his ever-engaging book The Butterfly Isles: A Summer in Search of Our Emperors and Admirals, takes us along on his account of the first British butterfly big year. One of his trickiest, yet most desirable, quarries was the Purple Emperor-the big, brilliant relative of our Hackberry Emperors. In his delightful chapter “The Curse of the Purple Emperor,” Barkham describes the perfect breakfast table laid out to attract this most esteemed and desirable of British butterflies, known as His Imperial Majesty: “On each of twenty paper plates was a different dollop of food. On one dish, two king prawns sweated in the sunshine. On another sprawled dozens of tiny pickled mudfish. There were crushed grapes, a blackened rotten banana, honey water, horse manure, fox scat and plenty of servings of stinking shrimp.” In the end it was the shrimp paste that did the trick. We had no shrimp paste or fox scat, but hoped the anchovies and rattlesnake might suffice.

As we headed south from our Best Western in Clarkston on the morning of July 17, it soon became apparent that butterflies would be scarcer than the two previous expeditions had experienced. The landscape was exceedingly dry. The willowy seeps along the basalt walls, where irrigation water from the plateau above finds its way down to the Snake River, held plenty of nectar: Teasel, White Sweetclover, thistle, and others. But of butterflies, only a few Cabbage Whites and Gray Hairstreaks, and the odd tiger swallowtail patrolling the rimrock breaks. And that’s the way it would go for the next two days: far less abundance and diversity of butterflies than showed either in mid-October of 2013 or early July last year. That was in accordance with what I’ve heard all over the state this summer, possibly in response to the great heat and drought of last summer having limited survivorship and the subsequent season’s output. No matter. We didn’t need numbers-just one good Hackberry Butterfly would do.

I described the location and setting of our target grove in Part 3 (G’num, November 2015). Now here we were again, the same male lazuli bunting, I’ll bet, singing his territorial tunes from the same tall hackberry. After we got the baits set up, we retreated to the rivershore to give David’s dog Loke a swim and a run. Though it wasn’t the 100 degrees plus of last July 4th, it was still plenty warm, and I took a wade as well. The bad part was stepping on my glasses when I got out, grinding them into basalt, leaving some formidable scratches in the lens. I figured at least it would make a good excuse for an imaginary sighting if the real thing didn’t come along.

Back at the grove, the only brown butterflies investigating our witch’s brew were wood nymphs, and they weren’t even interested enough to stop. I refreshed the sweet vinegar Riesling on the sponge, turned the rattlesnake, and settled in searching for larvae and pupae among the millions of hackberry leaves all around. The horned green caterpillars and the toothed green chrysalides are wonderfully cryptic against the sandpapery green leaves; but they are also very distinctive, and once you get the search image, they aren’t hard to find-IF there are any there! I had plenty of experience at this from my neighborhood shade-tree hackberries as a boy, but it did me no good here, where there was nary a hint of feeding damage, let alone the actual diners. A worn, brown Red Admirable gave us a scare for a moment, but it was the only nymph we saw. Loke, a pretty and well-furred Brittany/Springer spaniel, panted in the shade, and David and I shared a Terminal Gravity IPA from Enterprise that could have been colder but no tastier.

Late in the afternoon, a little deflated, we bounced our way along the gravel road back to Asotin and on to Clarkston, checking the hackberry stands along the river here and there. We were eager for a cold beer after a dusty day in the field. But having met, drunk, and dined the previous evening at Rooster’s Landing on the river, we decided to try for something different in Lewiston, across the bridge in Idaho. It was our good luck to find Effie’s Tavern, an utterly unassuming little place with gargantuan eight-inch, one-pound burgers, one of which did for both of us just fine. Forget the microbrews: it’s Bud Lite or Coors Lite. Don’t ask for your burger rare, and don’t argue with Christine. Just before closing, two boys arrived on scooters and asked for chocolate milkshakes. As we drove off, watching those lads scoot off with their milkshakes into the warm evening of old Lewiston was about the best thing we’d seen all day.

Day two came on sunny, but soon became overcast. That kept things cooler, but butterfly action was even subtler than the day before. The sun came and went. During another visit to the riverbank, big Viceroys glided among the willows and goldenrods. But in the grove, the action in the hackberries was nil, even around the stinky anchovies, by now good and ripe. The raccoons had left them alone during the night, and nary a yellowjacket paid them any interest.

In the afternoon, David and I decided to drive a little way up the little Joseph Creek road that soon leads into Oregon (for we were practically in the southeast corner of the state). On our October 2013 expedition, we’d left the Snake at 80 degrees in the sun and took that road south into dark and winter, with blowing snow on a high ridge before we made it across and down to Enterprise. This time it was a mild midafternoon in midsummer, and. we ventured only a little way south of the border before turning back. On the way, we stopped at the Joseph Creek Wildlife Area, which looked promising. Creeping up to the muddy shore, we spied a small mud-puddle club: the first I’d ever seen comprised of Cabbage Butterflies! With them were Common Sootywings, making a striking composition in black and white. In fact, the sootywings were the brightest note among the butterflies, for they were quite common, a real delight after having seen very few in recent years. Across from the puddle-club, a lovely swimming hole beckoned beneath a high basalt cliff. From there I spotted a stillingly beautiful little island in the creek, and waded downstream to it. Its cobbles were covered with a dense growth of Blue Verbena, a splendid nectar plant, in full bloom. I was excited for what I might find, but the only butterfly on the island was a bright, zippy little Mylitta Crescent.

Even so, two notable sightings rewarded our Joseph Creek detour. First, having stopped right at the barely marked state line to pick the season’s first blackberries, we both looked up to see a tatty old Monarch limping into Washington. There was no milkweed around, but having come this far, who’s to say it wouldn’t beat its way down to the Grand Ronde, the Snake, and on to the big stands of Showy Milkweed downstream at Rice Bar? Second, we stopped near a couple of handsome ranches to beat hackberry trees along the roadside, when what to my wondering eyes should appear but a brown butterfly rocketing past overhead. Just as last year, it was too far, fleet, and brief for a definitive look; but, just as then, I didn’t have a better hypothesis for what I momentarily spotted than Asterocampa celtis. And then we were down.

Long shadows of ancient basalt flows flooded the canyon as David and I quit our grove, empty-handed yet again. Yet, who is really empty-handed who has had a fine time in the field among plants and creatures? As Nabokov wrote, “the highest enjoyment of timelessness… is when I stand among rare butterflies and their foodplants.” Well, at least our days were spent abundantly among the foodplants; all that was missing were the butterflies. And that one brown chimera shooting by-I don’t think it was just the scratches on my specs- just might have been a down payment on the ultimate encounter.

As we parted the next morning, David off to the northwest toward Roslyn, me westerly around the Blues to spend my 69th birthday toddling among new and favorite habitats all the way down the Gorge, we resolved to continue the hunt. Since then, I have heard from Kim Zumwalt, an avid butterflier of the Idaho side, that the site where Ray Stanford first reported a Hackberry Butterfly along the Snake must have been at Cache Creek, a required stop for jet boats on the river. It’s not only thick with hackberries, but also has an old orchard of figs and apples that may well lure in the butterflies when they fall and rot. This intelligence certainly suggests a likely target for next year’s outing. It’s a darned good thing that among lepidopterists hope, like grasshoppers on hot basalt, springs eternal.

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