Watching Washington Butterflies with Bob Pyle Number Fifty*

Everyone knows that one of the most compelling features of the Lepidoptera is the order’s possession of a profound metamorphosis from egg through caterpillar and on into pupa and adult. We are (or should be) constantly aware of the fact that every one of our beloved butterflies and moths has actually been two different kinds of animal, with separate forms, foods, and functions: one a creeping, chewing creature, the other a flying, sucking one. We of WBA are particularly fortunate to have one of the best regional treatments of butterfly ontogeny in the world at our disposal: Life Histories of Cascadia Butterflies, by David Nunnallee and David James (Oregon State University Press, 2011). I hope that most of us give a fraction of the attention we grant the grown-up butterflies to their beautiful and fascinating immatures.

Just as the scientific journals are scattered with observations and studies over the years, adding up to a loose compendium of the sort the Davids brought together for us largely through their own rearing experience, general literature is loaded with poetic metaphors and bromides drawing upon metamorphosis as the manifestation of resurrection: the triumph of life over death. Clichés work for a reason, so I don’t disparage or downplay this old appropriation, but I prefer a nuanced approach. The Grove Street Cemetery on the Yale University campus in New Haven, Connecticut, (incorporated in 1797, it is the oldest formal burying ground in the country) has a big, gilded lepidopteran perched in the Gothic gable of the gatehouse. Some say it is the butterfly of rebirth, while others maintain it represents the moth of decay.

Either way, we can’t deny that insect metamorphosis profoundly affects our culture, whether in religion, pop-psych, or comic strips, farming and forestry, metaphysics or molecular biology. If it works for all of them’ whether as soulful similes or experimental systems (the many generations of Manduca sphinx moths in culture at the University of Washington almost rival fruit flies), then more power to them all. But WE are the really lucky ones, the happy few who actually know the actors and the plot, and live to see the outcome each spring.

One of the best ways to realize this bonus of being a butterflier is to rear them through. I have never reared leps on the scale of Nunnallee and James (who has??) or others of our peers such as Dave McCorkle and Jon Pelham. But I did raise quite a few as a kid. It was easy to find Painted Lady larvae in a thistle patch. Then to just take them home, add fresh thistles, and watch and wait. Cabbage White chrysalides hung under the eaves of our suburban Denver houses like Easter eggs in winter, and Mourning Cloaks’ thorny pupae in summer. Inspired by Gene Stratton Porter’s Moths of the Limberlost, I looked and looked for giant silkmoth cocoons in the fall-the magical Lunas, Imperials, and Promethias-but living outside the Eastern Deciduous Forest, I never found any until I introduced Cecropias to my mother’s lilacs, which they defoliated.

My great good luck lay in the fact that two of my favorite butterflies reproduced prolifically right there in my raw young subdivision. The builders of Hoffman Heights in east Aurora planted shade trees of several species along all the streets. The Chinese Elms of Revere (my street) were useless, except for shade and later for climbing with my pet anoles. But the next street east, Salem, was lined with alternating Hackberry trees and Green Ashes. Those first few years they were just the right height for scanning the lower limbs at eye level. It was a cinch to walk up one side of the street and down the other and simply pluck the fat green caterpillars as I went: the saw-backed, white-striped, horned and tailed Hackberry Emperors, the blue-eyed, hump-backed Doubletails sticking out their smelly osmeteria when I gripped them. Both species have greatly increased their abundance and range thanks to the generous use of these eastern trees all over the shade-thirsty West. (In more recent years, I walked my niece Heather along her own street in Colorado Springs, also lined with Green Ash, to recreate the experience with her.) Those summers in the late ‘fifties and early ‘sixties, my bedroom/laboratory was redolent with the rich scent of Hackberry leaves wilting in the heat. The plump, camouflaged chrysalides that followed were my just rewards for all the feeding. Then-a few days later for the Hack- berry butterflies and the following spring for the swallowtails-the immaculate adults popped out.

Maybe my most memorable rearing was that of the Oregon Swallowtail. In his May, 1936 National Geographic article, a devotional canticle of my youth, Laurence Ilsley Hewes (who contributed many early Washington records) described the adult in riveting terms as “a crisp, sharply marked denizen of the arid wind.” He went on to describe the difficulty of catching it in the hot basalt canyons, and recommended rearing it if possible. So in 1964, when my mother took me to Seattle on the train to see the UW, I insisted we visit the Columbia Gorge. There I found one caterpillar of Papilio bairdii oregonia. Though it feeds on Tarragon in the wild, it will accept umbels of the carrot family such as its relatives, the Anise and Indra swallowtails, require. So I begged extra parsley from the waiters in the dining car, and fed it on that all the way home and on to autumn pupation back home. It was only my bad luck that, after waiting all winter, my family was away on a mountain outing the day it chose to eclose…and my new kitten ate it.

Once I’d come to Seattle for college, my rearing took a back seat. But I do recall with excitement a trip over the Cascades to Tri-Cities with veteran collector Dan Carney to seek the autumn hibernaculi of Viceroys in the silked-on leaf-tips of willows along the Columbia. There was little room for rearing cages in the dorm. But there were spring willows leafing out beside the Montlake Fill for fodder, as the tiny caterpillars crawled out of their mummy bags looking for the first green of the season. Several years later I nearly reared Valerata Arctics from the high Olympics for the first time, using the climate-controlled chambers at Yale. In the end I lost them to a difficult mold just prior to pupation. I might have done better in my boyhood bedroom.

Well, the real reason that we make such hay from butterfly metamorphosis isn’t entirely due to their dramatic changes, which nearly beg belief. It is also, and perhaps mostly, that we change, too. Boy howdy don’t we just. None of us is the person we were when we fell in love with leps. I was always the kid, then the student, then the grad student, and the post-doc, but still more or less the kid, at the Lepidopterists’ Society meetings, in awe of the old timers I was privileged to meet: Legends such as Klots, Hessell, Brown, Comstock, Martin, Tilden, the Millers, the Remingtons, the Hodges, the Prestons, Clench, Ehrlich, Newcomer, and many others. And now, guess what-I am the old timer! How strange and all-of-a-sudden that seems.

Yet, it is only these sixty-odd years, and the changes they have brought to my experience, that have enabled me to share these fifty columns with the readers of G’num. That’s right-fifty! Which seems like a good time to shed this particular bit of larval skin. As I work and play my way through this final instar, I am simplifying right and left, as Henry Thoreau bid us do. I want to spend as much of my remaining time and energy as I can in the out-of-doors, amid the butterflies, moths, and tardigrades, if only in my own yard and valley. If I feel I have anything to say, I’ll send it in. But it’s high time for a fresh voice, or voices, in this slot.

I have very much enjoyed resurrecting that hoary old title “Watching Washington Butterflies” in the pages of this marvelous newsletter. Thank you for the space, the pulpit, and the platform, the reading, and the comments-nothing means more to a writer than they do. And thank you, Regina, for your excellent editing and layout, and for doing this demanding job at all.

So, here’s to you all, here’s to WBA, here’s to the habitat, and here’s to the butterflies-our reason, after all, for being here together. May that never change. Good butterflying, and cheers!

Signing out,

Bob Pyle

Swede Park

Gray’s River

April 30, 2023

G’num2023Vol24No2

*Editor’s Note – This is indeed Fifty. You may have notice the previous was also Fifty. Way back, number 21 was skipped. Rather than renumber them all and perhaps cause confusion, I’ve opted to have 2 Fifties. – Sylvia