Our beloved Sara’s Orangetip is sadly no more in Washington. No longer can we shout ‘Sara’ as we glimpse the dancing orange-tipped white butterflies that are true harbingers of spring in the Pacific Northwest. However, Sara is not dead; she has simply taken her family and gone to live in California! There you will find her through the length of that state still gracing the kinds of spring habitat we know her so well in.

In Washington we have a new girl in town and her name is Julia. Yes, Julia’s Orangetip will be what we shout when we spot the familiar orange-tipped white. It will take some getting used to I know but give it a few years and Sara will be a distant memory and Julia will be our new favorite spring girl.

We have Todd Stout, a Utah-based lepidopterist to thank for the shuffle of our Orangetip girls. Todd has spent many years looking at the Orange-tip species and subspecies complex in the western US and recently published the results of his study.

It was long suspected that Sara had multiple personality disorder and was really a number of different girls and we have to thank Todd for clarifying the situation. I am confident that the current arrangement should stand the test of time and Julia will remain our new girl into the future. Another small wrinkle is that while Julia occurs throughout Washington, Todd recognizes that the west side and east side forms are slightly different, enough to be named subspecies! So on the west side we have Julia Flora and on the eastside Julia Sulfuris! Flora of course is a nice old fashioned girl’s name but Sulfuris? Perhaps we will just stick with ‘Julia’ for eastside Orangetips……

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