The Western Spring Azure, or Echo Azure, Celastrina echo, is one of the first spring butterflies to make an appearance, and the first of the blues. In my garden it is usually the second butterfly, after the Cabbage Whites. Like most of the other early spring butterflies, it achieves that status by overwintering as a chrysalis, emerging as soon as the weather warms in April or even earlier. It is also known as the Echo Blue. There are a few different species of Celastrina that go by the common name Spring Azure, all small blues that appear early in spring. It has a very wide larval host range, the larvae being generalist feeders on flowers and fruits; red osier dogwood in particular is a common host. Other host plants in our area include elderberry, madrone, ceanothus, oceanspray, huckleberries, cherries and other Prunus, spiraeas, and bitterbrush. Caterpillars are weird greenish slug- like things with purple patterns, tended by ants. In our area there are usually 2 flights, the main flight season in April and a summer flight in August. Cooler areas of course have only one flight. I like to call it the Spring Azure to celebrate its status as one of the earliest butterflies of the year, but that’s a silly name for the summer flights so Echo Azure is a more appropriate name. Being a generalist feeder on such a wide range of hosts allows the Spring Azure to flourish in what are otherwise marginal habitats for butterflies, such as most of Western Washington. You can see it almost anywhere except the most urbanized settings: suburban gardens, larger city parks, greenbelts, commercial timber, rural residential, grasslands, riparian corridors, forest openings … I see it in my Olympia-area garden and the local parks (not athletic fields, those don’t count as parks), along logging roads, and in the South Sound prairie reserves. Adults nectar on a wide variety of flowers, and they also like to puddle and mud.

“Azure” is a shade of blue, generally a deep sky-blue or the color of lapis lazuli.

The Boreal Spring Azure, C. lucia, ranges across Canada but in Washington it appears only in limited areas in Yakima County. It has large dark markings below, but so does C. echo nigrescens. It has a similar host range as C. echo and a single flight.

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