Watching Washington Butterflies With Bob Pyle: Number Three

The following is an excerpt from “Mariposa Road: The First Butterfly Big Year” by Robert Michael Pyle. Bob calls this selection “On Ellensburg Pass.”

In the morning, I walked up a lithosol ridge bright with four species of buckwheat and masses of bitterroot on top. Lewisia rediviva was so named both for Captain Lewis and for its seeming immortality, reblooming each spring from vanished vegetation. Its display, like so many pink tutus tossed across the rocks, brought to mind the pink ice plant of Avalon but softer, in both petal and hue, and native. In a stunning pairing, a large mother-of-pearl spotted female juba skipper tanked up from bitterroot to bitterroot.

Butterfly hunters know that roads often furnish excellent territory. This fact owes partly to their edge quality, with woodland vegetation meeting the sunny opening of the cleared roadway. The wildflowers and other low plants growing in the verge offer plenty of nectar as well as caterpillar host plants. Roadsides’ other important quality is moisture. Seeps, creeks, and waterfalls flow down to roads and the ditches that line them, carrying rain and meltwater, pooling, and saturating the gravel, sand, and soil. Male butterflies visit these damp spots, seeking not so much water as mineral salts dissolved in it.

Mud-puddle clubs may have hundreds of swallowtails, skippers, blues, and others. Preoccupied, they may be approached closely by a deliberate watcher, but one net swing sets up a swirl of wings that takes minutes to resettle. Thanks to mudding, checking out roadsides can be highly strategic; it was for me as I climbed toward Ellensburg Pass. My first happy find among the masses was Moss’s elfin, one of the species I’d missed on Hood Canal. One old example kept company with brown elfins at the moist sand, a save for species I’d thought past. Ditto for an indra swallowtail and a sagebrush checkerspot, both worn females-surprising, since females rarely puddle. A small white surprised me by being a Becker’s, usually bigger, with parallel vein tracks of kelly green.

The next few novelties came in unmatched pairs.

First, two successive mountain sulphurs that you can’t find in alfalfa fields, one western and one Queen Alexandra’s. Then a pair of coppers-purplish and lilac- bordered-the first shimmering amethyst above if sunshine strikes the right angle, the second adorned as its name says in any light. Next, the trickling ditch doubled up on new blues, as I put up a cloud and swept it.

Releasing half a dozen species from Marsha’s bag back to their pubbery, I noted the first arrowhead blue, our largest kind, blazoned with not just one arrowhead but a whole quiver full, and a new buckwheat blue awaiting a name.

Rotating over a lush stream bank and under a ponderosa pine, a pair of brown mites resolved into western pine elfins. Another one visited desert parsley, while one more, just out of its chrysalis, hung purplish and pendent from Poa bulbosa. This ubiquitous introduced grass nods in the breeze, faking butterfly shadows to the suggestible peripheral vision; now here it was with a real butterfly on it. The western pine elfin looked almost like the eastern, with their shared zigzag patterns, but it was a long way from that Louisiana buttercup to this Cascadian glade.

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