Watching Washington Butterflies with Bob Pyle: Number Twenty Eight

One of our great mentors at the University of Washington in the late ‘sixties was the great botanist Arthur R. Kruckeberg. Much later the author of durable books including The Natural History of Puget Sound Country, Gardening with Native Plants, and Geology and Plant Life, we knew him in those early days as a master teacher and the faculty advisor for our campus conservation club. He was also splendid afield, where he was often found together with his boon companion and fellow professor Frank Richardson, the mammalogist and ornithologist, each sporting his white goatee and pipe. I’m not sure I would have made it through my undergraduate years without the two of them, and their brave support for a young would-be naturalist in a modern university.

So it was a giant surprise and honor when, decades later, I got to teach alongside Art at the Spring Naturalists’ Retreats of the North Cascades Institute. For several years running, we spent five charmed days leading our field classes over roughly parallel trails on Sun Mountain in the Methow Valley. Thea, equally adept with wildflowers and butterflies, danced back and forth between us, assisting both classes. Art and I planned our routes

to converge on an old homestead at lunchtime, where picnic tables sat around a meadow beneath an enormous pioneer lilac bush. As the botany students and butterfliers broke bread together, Art and I arrayed ourselves on one of the tabletops and launched a volley of give-and-take conversation about plants, insects, and their co-evolution. Each of us had his holy implement beside him: for Art, it was his prized “Daubenmire Stick,” a black-and-white graded scaling rod given him by the great botanist Rexford F. Daubenmire of WSU. For me, it was my beloved butterfly net Marsha, crafted of a Colorado cottonwood limb. I imagine we two bearded nature-geezers resembled landlocked Neptunes, with Dauby Stick and Marsha for tridents.

Often as not, a big female Pale Tiger Swallowtail would alight on the lilac and tank up on sweet nectar, or an Echo Azure would flicker through on its high road into some flowering shrub or tree, and we’d be off with correlation, speculation, and disputation. It was fun for us, and I don’t doubt for the students, to see that kind of biological give-and-take. The stories of plant scientists and entomologists collaborating to learn how plants and insects collaborate just flew back and forth. “Didn’t Darwin say…,” Art would offer; and I’d respond with some- thing from Paul Ehrlich or Lincoln Brower. Art called it our “Alphonse & Gaston” act. “Or is it Abbot & Costello?”, I’d quip. But quite apart from any entertainment value our jolly colloquy might have had, or its value in keeping it interesting for ourselves year after year, the point was surely taken home with every participant that you don’t get butterflies without plants. As Art liked to say, quoting Goethe, “Alles ist Blatt!”-everything is leaf!

Another one of our great teachers at the UW was C. Leo Hitchcock, editor of the monolithic Flora of the Pacific Northwest. Thea (who later served as Hitchie’s herbarium assistant) and I both had the great good fortune of taking Botany 113 (Local Flora) from him, and to this day I consider it the most valuable class I’ve ever had, along with typing. For when one is basically acquaint- ed with the families of plants, and a number of representative genera and species, the green world opens up, and the connection between plants and insects becomes not only obvious, but also possible to parse. You can go forth anywhere and, as Anne Zwinger writes in The Near-sighted Naturalist, feel a little at home if you “recognize some friends (nice old Mr. Agave, dear Aunt Mustard, and dearest friend, Anenome). ” And that can make all the difference to a butterflier, and to her success in field or garden.

My title “Butterflies as Botanists” is a bit of a jape, since not only butterflies and moths but all herbivorous insects are evolved to know the plants upon which they depend with exquisite and mortal intimacy. Imagine a Monarch that couldn’t tell the difference between a milkweed and a milk vetch. It wouldn’t leave any offspring, and that’s how natural selection works: it rewards reproductive adeptitude. Monarchs and milkweeds have co-evolved for many thousands of years, so they both know what to expect of each other. Plants can cope with the predators they become used to, and those predators do best by specializing on reliable crops-especially if they can derive double-duty from them, such as protective toxins as well as basic nutrition. Hackberry-feeding snout butterflies have been found fossilized with hackberry leaves millions of years old.

But the other part-Butterfliers as Botanists-deserves our close attention. I find few experiences in the field more satisfying than checking out a stand of plants with the hope or expectation that a particular type of butterfly will be there, and lo!, it actually is. I remember the first colony of Hoary Elfins I found in the state, while working on Watching Washington Butterflies in 1970. Having known from boyhood in Colorado that the species frequented kinnikinnick or bearberry (Arctostaphylos uva-ursi), I pulled over to examine a roadside blanket of this plant near Littlerock in Thurston County. No sooner did I give Marsha a swish over the pink flowers and dark green leaves than an elfin popped up, then another, and several more in quick succession. That was fun! Not as much fun, a few years later, was whacking acres of Kinnikinnick at Leadbetter Point to find that every little butterfly responding was a Brown Elfin, quite happy with Bearberry as well as Salal, or else a Pine Elfin from the Shore Pines all around. It doesn’t always work; you do have to be where the butterfly actually occurs.

On another occasion, I was seeking Sandia Hairstreaks in New Mexico. This butterfly, though beautiful coppery-green, hefty, and highly distinctive, wasn’t even discovered until it turned up in a 4-H collection in 1958! I’d never seen it before, and was hoping to find it for the Butterfly Big Year in 2008. I’d checked patches of the hostplant, Nolina, a monocot called Beargrass (but not related to our plant of that name) in the Magdalena Mountains and near Socorro and White Sands, without success. But at the type locality in the Sandia Mountains near Albuquerque, the Nolina was abundant and jumping with Callophrys macfarlandi. Again it paid off to know the plant and hang around it. Many of us could name dozens of such experiences.

Of course, it’s always pleasant and sometimes productive simply to cruise the countryside, looking for what pops up; and frequenting colorful clusters of nectar flowers often gives good results. Clearly, you don’t positively have to be proficient at plant identification to enjoy butterflies. But in my experience and that of many friends and colleagues, the better your botany, the more butterflies you’ll find-especially specialists and rarities. And commoner kinds get commoner yet when you seek them at their “headquarters”, as the old lepidopterists put it. Want admirables, angles, and torts? Look for nettles! Fancy some frits? Go for Violas! Hoping for Viceroys, Cloaks, and Sylvan Hairstreaks? Wander among the willows! And of course everyone in WBA knows by now that dotted and spangled blues haunt buckwheats (=G’nums).

Not that such a strategy is foolproof. Readers of this column will know that I have made myself a frequent fixture of Asotin County Hackberry groves without finding Hackberry Butterflies; but if we ever do, that’s where they will be. Nor is this approach limited to wildlands in its application. Obviously, the better butterfly garden will be the botanically sophisticated one. You can take a short cut, and learn along the way, by obtaining , following ,and studying the Xerces Society’s beautiful and highly useful new book, Gardening for Butterflies.

No one will any longer have the good luck that Thea and I enjoyed to learn our plants at the feet of Art Kruckeberg or C. Leo Hitchcock. Their like will not come again. But there are still some excellent field botanists in the teaching ranks, both in the colleges and the summer institutes. There is a lot of help and plant fellow- ship available in the Washington Native Plant Society, including Study Weekends and ID-intensive field trips where learning comes fast. And if none of this appeals or is possible for you, there is nothing to keep you from picking up a copy of Pojar & MacKinnon* or any of the other excellent field guides, and having at it in the field for yourself. Of course, there are lots and lots of plants out there. Getting to know them all might take a lifetime. But even learning a new flower a week, a new tree every summer, is much better than nothing. Soon you too will be able to say, “Aha! There’s my good friend Ocean Spray, and her old pal, Salal!” Watching where the butterflies go and what they do will help you narrow down the most important plants to learn first.

Butterfliers as botanists? You bet—and the very best teachers are the butterflies them- selves. They really know their plants.

*Westside, use Pojar and MacKinnon’s Plants of the Pacific Northwest Coast. Eastside, use Parish, Coupe and Lloyd’s Plants of Southern Interior British Columbia and the Inland Northwest. Both from Lone Pine Press.

Gardening For Butterflies

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