Since I joined this group in 2008, I have been deeply impressed that even in the shortest, coldest days of the year, when Cascadian butterflies are in hiding in their various life stages, we WBA members continue a wide range of activities almost without ceasing. We might in fact be glad for the forced retreat to indoor work, where we can focus on reorganizing and labeling photos, planning trips or sharing information with colleagues. I hardly know how I would survive a life of butterfly chasing in the tropics, though I often idealize what that might be like. When do Costa Ricans make time for their spread sheets, or Brazilians for their web posts? Surely it would be overwhelming.

In this regard, I think of our WBA Board members, who have come off a retreat this past October 8th, rededicated to consolidating our group as a free standing, statewide entity. I want to thank all eight of our board members for meeting all day with me out in Ellensburg to help delineate our areas of focus for the next year. With your member feedback from our visioning process at the 2015 conference in Omak still in mind, we came up with a list of five priorities: 1) become a statewide group, and continue revising our leadership and communication structures to be effective over this broad area. 2) Increase membership. 3) Develop leadership and increase volunteerism! (Yes, Dave Nunnallee is still the best field trip leader, but he does not have to be on the hook to lead them all! You could probably lead one yourself!) 4) Fund raising and how to spend what we have. 5) Promote conservation of butterflies and their habitats.

You all will notice some interesting changes, some frustrating, some quite exciting. It was undoubtedly frustrating to watch while my digital link with the membership meeting winked on and off last week as I tried to provide a summary of eight years’ worth of our Eastern Washington field highlights, “Coloring Outside the Lines”. Bugs abounded, not all of them butterflies, but we made it through the slides and had some fun in the process. What an advantage it will be when we can get a reliable remote webcast sent to Seattle, Spokane or anywhere else in the state! If you know good speakers on butterfly related things anywhere, send us their names. We are quite close to having the technical capability to hear from folks at the McGuire Center in Florida, the Butterfly Center at Mission, TX, or from our friends closer to home at Oregon State, or wherever.

We began to sketch out plans for more advanced learning opportunities in order to promote broader knowledge of the harder to find, harder to identify butterfly species. A weekend workshop on greater fritillaries or sulphurs perhaps? A smaller overnight field conference that meets at a special area? We are also interested in formalizing the 15-plus years worth of institutional knowledge put together by our predecessors, so that in the future key volunteer positions will be more easily taught and learned, and so that our leadership will generally become more transparent. In this regard, I especially want to thank Al Wagar for his pioneering work organizing our written archives and videos into searchable thumb drives or other records that each of us Boardies now can use.

Conservation gained our attention as an explicitly higher priority than in the past. We will have some new efforts to which we can each make important contributions: we might help in restoring Moxee Bog as a far flung scabland home for the now absent Silver Bordered Fritillary. We might work with David James and the Xerces Society in tracking western Monarchs, which have plunged into a precipitous population decline over the past 20 years. We can help by monitoring butterfly species at our area DNR lands, wildlife refuges or other important wildlife habitats. We on the board remain open to hearing what all of our members have to say about these topics.

G’num2016Vol17No4