Watching Washington Butterflies With Bob Pyle: Number Nine

I believe almost all naturalists like to make lists of what they record on their rambles. True, some people find the very activity of listing to be demeaning of the organisms tallied, as if it somehow “objectifies” them. And it can be like that, as with the gonzo bird listers known in Britain as “twitchers.” But it can also be just plain fun. I enjoy listing on various levels. There is something about the tally that intensifies the pleasure of the hunt. And that’s not all: lists can actually focus our attention such that our identifications are more likely to be accurate, and they can become useful agents of scientific knowledge and biological conservation in their own right.

The first butterfly list I kept intensively, year after year, was for the place I call my “birthplace as a naturalist”: the High Line Canal, an urban, suburban, and rural waterway that runs through the environs of Denver and Aurora, Colorado, where I grew up. As related in detail in my book The Thunder Tree (in print from Oregon State University Press), the High Line was my retreat, my special place of initiation and wild discovery, and where I learned my butterflies. As a moist, linear corridor, the canal hosted many of the plants- and therefore the butterflies-typical of both mountains and plains. There was far more prime habitat in those days than now, though some of the best bits have been, and are being, protected. By the time I published a little booklet on “The Butterflies of the High Line Canal of Colorado” (1971), I had recorded almost one-tenth of the known USA butterfly species along my humble old ditch. Each addition to this list brought a special fillip of pleasure, as well as a clearer understanding of its fauna. I am sure I learned better, faster, and deeper because of the detailed and annotated list I made.

We make many kinds of lists…life lists, trip lists, year lists, yard lists. I stopped keeping life lists for either birds or butterflies years ago, but I’ve made many of the other kinds. Any trip receives a boost of enthusiasm and energy when there is a list to keep up, and it’s a good way to occupy the kids- infinitely preferable to on-board electronics, in my opinion. I enjoy listing not only from a car and on foot, but on train trips as well. I’ve spotted nearly a hundred species of birds on winter rail journeys from Seattle to Denver, and on a train from St. Louis to Kansas City, I managed to ID seventeen species of butterflies with reasonable certainty.

Annual lists are fun to compare from one year to the next, and can be most illustrative of the weather and climate (see last issue’s column!). And, you get to start over every January 1. The yard list is a special case, because it has the power to stimulate better butterfly management of our own immediate precincts. By attending to nectar and host plants, as well as to exposure and other factors, Thea and I have managed to jack our yard list at Swede Park, a two-and-a- half acre sliver of rainforest and old farmstead in ultra-rainy southwest Washington, up to some fifty species in thirty- three years: almost equal to the whole Wahkiakum County list.

Listing can be as competitive as you wish, or not at all. About the only time I can remember being really competitive about listing was when I vied with a friend over our yard-bird lists in Seattle in the late sixties. He lived near Ravenna, and I was out by Sand Point. For a while we telephoned several times a day with our “Take that! Pheasant!” and “Ha! Kestrel!” But for most of my listing life, I have competed only with myself, the clouds, and the length of the day. On the contrary, listing can be a great spur to collaboration, nowhere better than on annual counts. The Fourth of July Butterfly Counts, begun by the Xerces Society in 1975 and run by NABA since 1993, convert the play of cooperative listing into comparative data-gathering with real analytical potential. How does Chumstick Mountain differ since 1985?

Check the counts!

Any list can assist us in watching things more closely, and in paying better attention when we make determinations of identity. After all, paying attention is the very business of the naturalist. When we take names and do it reliably, we help to create the basic faunistic checklists that have long been the foundation of habitat monitoring and conservation. Descriptive listing is no longer fashionable in academic circles-you can’t get tenure or grants for it-but science always comes back to the raw data (that’s us) for necessary knowledge of the organisms in their habitats. Again and again, the tenured faculty falls back on the volunteer amateurs for the basic field knowledge they need (remember, “amateur” means “one who loves”). So it is that cutting-edge, quantitative science still depends upon the labors of the amateur, qualitative list-makers. When our WBA field trips and annual conferences, and our individual forays, help to flesh out the checklists and natural history of local butterflies in particular places, we undergird the experimental science that can lead to understanding and conservation of the butterflies we love.

Perhaps the apotheosis of the personal list is the Big Year. In this exercise, a person tries to see and identify as many species as possible in a given area in one calendar year. Birding big years began in the thirties, and have grown into a highly competitive activity since. The great books in this genre, in which the love of birds and countryside eclipse competition, are Wild America by Roger Tory Peterson and James Fisher, and Kingbird Highway by Kenn Kaufman. I consider both titles masterpieces of natural history writing-superbly observed, funny, wonderful romps. The best seller in this field, however, was The Big Year, by Mark Obmascek, which is all about competition. It has recently been made into a pretty good movie of the same name, starring (remarkably) Steve Martin and Jack Black. If nothing else, these contests at least focus public attention on something other than strictly human concerns. The same can be true for butterflies.

Butterfly big years have not taken off to the extent of birding big years. To my knowledge, the one I undertook in 2008 (told in Mariposa Road) was the first. The next one I know about took place in Great Britain in 2009. The person who did it, Patrick Barkham, wrote a good book about it. I reviewed The Butterfly Isles favorably in Vol. 66, no. 1 of the Journal of the Lepidopterists’ Society (March 2012) and I highly recommend the read-it is, of course, very different from Mariposa Road, with only 59 species to count in the whole U.K.! Still, or maybe therefore, it makes for a very engaging tale. The only other one I know was Chris Kline’s BBY journey around the US by Harley Davidson in 2011 (http://butterflyrider.blogspot.com/). Chris hopes to write it up in a book. It is not an easy thing to organize one’s life, family, responsibilities, and finances so as to slip away in search of butterflies for an entire year-whether by Honda or Harley!

I have heard rumors of a few state BBYs, but I’ve seen no details. Who will do the first Butterfly Big Year for Washington? Would it be possible to see all of the state’s butterflies in one year? You’d have to have awfully good luck with the weather and the biennial species. I’d love to try it myself, but I doubt that I shall. A BBY requires total involvement, and one runs the risk of falling into the trap that has captured many of the birders: the list mattering more than the butterflies themselves. Here is how I approached that challenge for Mariposa Road:

“My intent here was to let the game drive the days enough to keep me moving but not so much as to call all the shots. My promise to the butterflies, my readers, and myself was never to let mere listing, ticking, or twitching the species supersede or get in the way of solid, meaningful encounter with the animal and its habitat. And while I concentrated on butterflies, I attended to all of the flora and fauna, including people.” This might not be the worst way to approach listing in general.

And so, with the whole picture in mind, have fun-and good listing!

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