Watching Washington Butterflies With Bob Pyle: Number Thirteen

Do you keep a life list of Washington butterflies?

I do. I don’t try to maintain a worldwide butterfly life list, but I do keep one, more or less, for the U.S. and Canada. And I definitely keep track of the butterflies I have seen here in Washington, in hopes of eventually seeing all of our species within the state’s borders. No one has managed to do so yet. I know this to be a fact, since two or three species on our checklist have been seen by only one or two people each, ever, as far as we know. So any of us could be the first to check them all off. Not that such a distinction is very important in itself, apart from the

personal satisfaction it would bring. After all, listing is a game-harmless in itself, but valuable for the concentration it can bring to the task. The really important thing is the encounters with the butterflies themselves, and with their habitats, and the days afield that such a list represents.

David Nunnallee updated the checklist of Washington butterflies in 2009. I jotted an ad-hoc list in my field notebook during a long road trip last summer (while Thea was driving!). Reconciling Dave’s list and mine, we come up with between 150 and 155 species-depending on certain lumps, splits, and pending descriptions of new blues, whether a couple of one-time strays are accepted, and whether we really have Canadian tiger swallowtails in Washington, or just some introgressed genes of theirs from B.C. This is not such an intimidating total in itself, out of a little more than 800 species north of Mexico: not so many as to defeat anyone’s hopes of seeing them all. And if we were to remove all the accidentals, strays, and visitors from the list, and stick with just the regular breeding species, we get about 145, which is even more approachable.

It is those seven accidentals-Checkered White, Dainty Sulphur, Reakirt’s Blue, Pygmy Blue, Zebra Longwing, Variegated Fritillary, and White Admiral-that represent the greatest challenges to ever seeing them in the state. Indeed, some of them might never be recorded here again, such as the Zebra Longwing, which probably came into the Snake River Canyon on a boxcar; and the White Admiral found in Tri-Cities by Patti Ensor, likely a pupal stowaway on a camper. Though others, like the Dainty Sulphur and the Pygmy Blue, probably will reappear, along with the as-yet unrecorded Buck- eye, thanks to the warming climate causing such southern species to reach ever farther north in the summertime.

So you might well be forgiven for limiting your goal to the residents and regularly breeding species (including the annual immigrant monarch). But even then, a number of significant challenges remain for the would-be life-lister in Washington. Some of our butterflies occur only in remote areas of the North Cascades or Okanogan Highlands, requiring a backpack or a stiff hike into the wilderness to find them. These include Labrador Sulphur, Lustrous Copper, Astarte Fritillary, Melissa Arctic, and Alpine Checkered Skipper, all of which might be sought by a backpacking butterflier in the Pasayten Wilderness Area or in the never-collected Pickett Range of North Cascades National

Park. Butterfliers, with a few notable exceptions, have not been backpackers on the whole. I remember a young one named Shaundelle Vail, who was hopeful of finding some of our special rarities. We steered her parents to the Pasayten, where (on a vigorous family back- packing trip), Shaundelle netted several of our hardest-to-find arctic-alpine specialties in new locales-including the mysterious greenish Labrador Sulphur, which few WBA members have beheld in the wild.

Several other highly localized species may be approached by automobile; but being simply rare in nature, at least in Washington, they are never a sure thing for those who seek them. For example, to see the Freija Fritillary in abundance, you may visit certain Colorado willow bogs soon after the snow melts, or stride the North Slope of Alaska, where the butterfly abounds. But insofar as its range in Washington goes, Freija is limited to a few sites in Okanogan County, several of which have been badly burned out in recent forest fires. Or take Johnson’s Hairstreak: this dwarf mis- tletoe-feeder occurs only around old-growth conifers, and seldom comes to the ground. Clearly, that makes it a difficult find, since precious few ancient forest groves remain. The Golden Hairstreak occupies even fewer sites, since it requires the hyper- restricted golden chinquapin as its larval host, but it is fairly reliable at the south end of the Big Lava Bed in August.

Some of these great rarities are associated with traditional places for viewing them: Staircase at the head of Lake Cushman for Johnson’s Hairstreak, where it may come down to nectar on Oregon grape flowers in May alongside cedar hairstreaks; or Slate Peak above Hart’s Pass for the Lustrous Copper, where a lucky watcher might find the Astarte Fritillary as well. But then you also need to get there during the right flight sea-

son, which can vary by weeks from year to year depending upon snowmelt; and for biennial species, even in the right year. The Astarte Fritillary, for example, flies in even years only. And finally-need I say it-even if all other factors are go, you’ll still need to get there on a sunny day!

My own Washington life list stands at about 135. I have been very lucky in seeing the Dainty Sulphur, the Pygmy Blue, and the Melissa Arctic, the latter at the very summit of Chopaka Mountain. I am still missing five accidentals

(Checkered White, Reakirt’s Blue, Zebra Longwing, Variegated Fritillary, White Admiral) and ten residents (Canadian Tiger Swallowtail, Labrador Sulphur, Lustrous Copper, one or two of the dotted blues (genus Euphilotes) currently under study for description, Freija Fritillary, Pale Crescent, Alpine Checkered Skipper, Tawny-Edged Skipper, and Nevada Skipper). I’ve seen all of them elsewhere, except for the Labrador Sulphur and those new blues (in fact, the Tawny-Edge was my common lawn-skipper as a boy in Denver).

It should not be so difficult to see the Tawny-Edged Skipper and the Nevada Skipper in Washington, requiring only that I show up at the right place (Tiger Meadows and Manastash Ridge, respectively) at the right time. The Pale Crescent is a bugaboo species for me, and never an easy given in this state. I should be able to see the Lustrous Copper at Slate Peak, but haven’t succeeded in several attempts (though I have seen many, belonging to other subspecies, in the high rockslides of Colorado and the Sierra Nevada). But the Labrador Sulphur and the Alpine Checkered Skipper-ah, now they will require some real effort (of which I hope I am still capable when I get the opportunity!) and a lot of boot leather. For the Freija Frit and the Canadian Tiger, see above. And as for those dotted blues, the dust hasn’t settled yet on just which species belong on the checklist, and what their names will be.

But what if we ever did see them all? Finishing a life list…whoa! Then what? Well, we could always emulate those avid birders who pursue life lists for each county in Washington. Or just pull out my column # 5 on state records yet to come, and help make the checklist longer!

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Common and scientific names of species mentioned in this column:

Alpine Checkered Skipper (= Grizzled Skipper) (Pyrgus centaureae), Tawny-Edged Skipper (Polites themistocles), Nevada Skipper (Hesperia nevada), Checkered White (Pontia protodice), Dainty Sulphur (Nathalis iole), Labrador Sulphur (Colias nastes), Lustrous Copper (Lycaena cupreus), Golden Hairstreak (Habrodais grunus), Johnson’s Hairstreak (Callophrys johnsoni), Reakirt’s Blue (Echinargus isola), Pygmy Blue (Brephidium exilis), dotted blues (genus Euphilotes), Zebra Longwing (Heliconius charitonius), Variegated Fritillary (Euptoeita claudia), Freija Fritillary (Boloria freija), As- tarte Fritillary (Boloria astarte), Pale Crescent (Phyciodes pallida), White Admiral (Limenitis arthemis), Buckeye (Junonia coenia), and Melissa Arctic (Oeneis melissa).

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