Watching Washington Butterflies With Bob Pyle: Number Ten

As if in poetic revenge for my last-but-one column, “Mold Butterflies: The Rot Factor”, this past spring and early summer were perhaps the worst for butterflies in my entire three decades-plus in Wahkiakum County. I took some comfort in the fact that I would be in my old Colorado butterfly haunts not once, but three times between May and August. The state where I learned my butterflies is rightfully famed for its high diversity and abundance of these insects. But in the event, all three visits were fairly understated for their butterflies. Whereas a La Niña year here on the West Coast means a wet, stormy spring, it conversely (and perversely!) makes for an early, hot, and parched summer inland. So the Colorado flowers and pollinators came on early, then dried out and just dribbled through the rest of the season. So we got the worst of it at both ends; we couldn’t win for losing.

The other saving grace, however, to which I looked forward, was the almost-always reliable coming of what the English call High Summer-those languorous, Mediterranean days of August, when the rain finally retreats, the sun decides to come out until at least early fall, and the butterflies-no matter how bad it’s been before-at last appear. This year I missed the start of this annual calendrical gift, trying to find arctic-alpine butterflies in the Rockies. But when I came home, there it was-the mornings of heavy fog, burning off into days of echo-azure hue that might reach seventy degrees. . . or even eighty! But would the butterflies respond, even this summer, moldiest of moldy years?

So often it happens that the best days outside are days that we are obliged to remain indoors, for work or family or other pressing needs. Yesterday was the exception: I spent it exactly where I wanted to be-on our front porch, in full view of the sunny side of the garden. Oh, I was working, but it was work that could as easily be carried out there, as within the house. As it happens, I was meeting with Jean Thompson Black, my editor at Yale University Press, which is going to publish a paperback edition of my book Mariposa Road. Jean elected the front porch for our conference site, and I readily concurred. Though our session probably took twice as long for all the distraction, it worked out just fine.

As the morning mist lifted and the temperature climbed, the first respondent was an almost black flip-flopping form, one of several common wood nymphs that would dance around the house all day. He (it was a fresh male) alighted on the porch rail just out of reach, where Jean could see the double-defense of crypsis (camouflage-but not against white paint) and bright eyespots to draw avian attack away from the body. Then came the little darting deltas of the woodland skippers, nectaring on scarlet pinks in a pot at our feet, and then, successively, on almost every other nectar source around the place. Tawny and fleet, they made things lively in a hurry. It wasn’t long until whites turned up bouncing across the yard like self-propelled ping-pong balls, both our native margined whites and a cabbage white or two. Western tiger swallowtails came and went, their long legs dangling like an airplane’s undercarriage, as if overseeing the whole show.

Already this would have been a pretty good showing for these depauperate precincts, but from there it just got better. It is the time of the bright nymphs of High Summer, and they did not disappoint. The day before, Thea had spotted a light, fresh satyr anglewing still on a leaf, having been dispatched by a large crab spider. Now here was another satyr, zipping around the big Port Orford cedar they always seem to prefer, and making sallies into other sunny corners of Swede Park. One salmon flash may have been a lone painted lady passing through, and then a couple of its congeners appeared on various flowers alongside, and nudging over, the skippers: these of course were red admirables, or as WBA native plant guru Stewart Wechsler delightfully calls them, red-gartered ladies. As many readers know, what most folks call red admirals invaded the Northeast and upper Midwest this spring by the many thousands, maybe millions. The West experienced no such massive influx, but they have turned up in our usual modest numbers.

Jean was already charmed by the demonstration, which would have caused anyone who didn’t know any better to think we dwell in a great butterfly spot. As trains of skippers swirled around the garden like little gold meteors, and the swallowtails dabbled and floated, we both had a challenge keeping our minds on our task. And it wasn’t just the butterflies! As we watched a woodland skipper sipping from a yellow flower of the native large-leaved avens, a scarlet meadowhawk basked on the tip of a sword fern just beyond. Then a rufous hummingbird came to see us, hanging in the air right before our noses. An aggressive male swallowtail harassed a pale worn female until she left, and then flew twenty feet straight up at a passing raven.

Then came the capper, as a large form floated slowly across our vision. It was about the biggest, broadest female Lorquin’s admiral I’d ever

seen! The size of a California sister, she levitated back and forth across the porch, around the front yard, over the rhodie, under the oak, ’round and ’round the house, with the occasional flick of her citrus-tipped wings, for the next couple of hours. “She’s parasailing!” said Jean, who couldn’t believe the collective spectacle. I tried to act as if it were all just normal in these sunny climes of ours, but really, I couldn’t believe it either. Later, Jean summed up the admiral’s display, and the day’s butterfly watch as a whole: “That was the best bib’n’tucker performance ever!”

And so the day played on, cadres of swallowtails up and down and all around, and a single late-brood echo azure passing through the field of my binoculars as I watched the tigers. Of the week’s butterflies, only a Clodius parnassian failed to appear for the day’s tally. When we finally had to go in, the swirl was still in play.

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So what does it say, that one of the worst butterfly counties in the country could offer up “the best bib’n’tucker performance ever” in the appraisal of an experienced natural history editor? To me, it reinforces what I often tell people when they ask me why a butterfly guy like me lives in a damp place like this: in the first place, it may be subtle, but there are certain species well adapted here that can furnish some good lepping. In the second, being so subtle, few have studied the cutover rainforest of the Willapa Hills, so that much of what one does find is excitingly new. And thirdly, what one learns from a relative barren is the power of the individual: when they are so few, you come to fully appreciate every single butterfly, and that is a gift. But in this instance, I didn’t need to invoke any of those rationales: it was just plain spectacular, by any standards, with several butterflies of several kinds visible at any one moment, in a great moving montage of color and motion.

This one day in Willapa also goes to show that butterfliers everywhere may live in hope of better days to come: if a day like this can happen here, it can happen almost anywhere. Even in a season that has been notoriously wretched in its earlier weeks, conditions can congeal to bring about a perfect storm of butterflies. This happened in 1992 and 2002, all summer long; and it has happened here again in High Summer, 2012.

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