Watching Washington Butterflies with Bob Pyle: Number Forty Seven

One given during my earlier years as a lepidopterist was that butterfly study was a country of men and boys. The great majority of members of the Lepidopterists’ Society were male, with women appearing at the annual meetings chiefly as wives and camp followers. Among the young, I didn’t know a single girl who collected butterflies. All the manuals were addressed to “lads” and “boys” as the proper practitioners of this hobby. Some even opined, as Roger Tory Peterson put it in his introduction to Watching Washington Butterflies, “It has been suggested that butterflies may symbolize a boy’s adolescent dreams of the fair sex, gossamer and floss creatures to be pursued and-just possibly-possessed.” Butterflies were a man’s world; that’s just the way it was, or seemed.

Of course there were some exceptions, in fact. We were aware of famous women butterfly painters or students of the past, such as Maria Sybilla Merian or Lady Glanville, for whom a British checkerspot was named but whose will was contested as belonging obviously to someone of unsound mind. There were a few well known female scientists working in Lepidoptera, like Annette Braun and Miriam Rothschild. And a handful of women Lep Soc members in their own right, including Jo Brewer, Jackie Miller, and Elaine Hodges-not to mention June Preston (of Tharsalea mariposa junia Pyle & Hammond, June’s Copper, of the Olympic Peninsula).

June and her husband Floyd comprised the most productive museum butterfly collecting team in the country. Other life partners contributed specimens, such as Washington pioneer Lepidopterist J. F. Gates Clarke’s wife Thelma, on a lesser scale. But on the whole, an extraterrestrial observer might have fairly concluded that this odd little subsection of humans was almost strictly fraternal.

What about here in Washington? Aha! Here, the situation has been, and remains, quite interest- ing and not so simple in terms of gender. To begin with, there have been four master’s degrees awarded by the University of Washington for butterfly studies, in 1913, 1917, 1946, and 1973-two boys, two girls. But it might surprise you to know that the first two of them were for theses written by young women post-graduate students, to wit: “The Butterflies of Washington,” by Lucia Eola Edson, 1913; and “A List of the Lepidoptera of the Insect Collection of Orson Bennett Johnson,” by Louise Farrar Pennell, 1917. Ms. Edson’s dissertation was the very first checklist of Washington butterflies, and Ms. Pennell’s detailed the contents of the first major collection in the predecessor to the Burke Museum. As such, they are the foundational documents of Washington butterfly studies-making possible those of Leighton in 1946 and Pyle in 1973-researched and written by women.

The inspiration (and supervising professor) for both theses was Orson Bennett Johnson, the first professor of natural sciences at the UW, though he died before Pennell’s was finished. Johnson (of Johnson’s Hairstreak) also mentored the Young Naturalists’ Society, founded by Seattle pioneers Charles L. Denny and Edmond S. Meany, for many years. The YNS included many women teachers among its members, an influential president in the 1890s being Adella Parker. A well-known early photograph by A. W. Denny (see page 26 in Butterflies of Cascadia) depicts a waist-coated OBJ afield with Dr. Maud Parker and Adella Parker Bennett in long dresses and hats-replete with nets-sure proof that women were a vital early part of insect studies here.

A contemporary of these Seattle players was Agnes Veazie (1869-1963), a collector in Portland. She too had a checkerspot named in her honor: Euphydryas anicia veazieae Fender & Jewett.

Though an Oregonian, she and her family had a cottage in Ocean Park, Washington, and it was there that she collected the now-federally threatened Oregon Silverspot (Argynnis zerene hippolyta) in 1916, its first (and for half a century, last) records in the state. Her daughter, Harriet Veazie Reinhard, followed in her footsteps, to become the chief authority on San Francisco butterflies. I knew her, and had a chance to see remnants of Agnes and Harriet’s collection at San Francisco’s Josephine D. Randall Junior Museum, on Corona Heights, including some of those old, rare frits.

Perhaps the next prominent woman player on the Washington butterfly scene was Emily Hendrickson, known far and wide as “The Butterfly Lady.” Emily lived in Sunnyside, and collected all over Yakima County and the surrounding mountains in and around the nineteen-fifties. She swapped and sold specimens to collectors far and wide, and is represented in many museums. As a teen in Colorado, I corresponded with her and bought some of her material. Emily’s family had a cabin on Orcas Island, where she did some important early sampling, including the San Juan County records for the Great Arctic, Moss’s Elfin, and others. In later years, I determined to meet The Butterfly Lady at all costs while I still could, having (to my great disappointment) missed out on some other elders by putting it off. By chance, I met her niece, who facilitated our happy visit in a Portland nursing home. Later, I called on the niece, Ruth Adamson, and her husband Harley, in their Montesano home. She had much of Emily’s collection, kept in air-tight Riker mounts, pressed under glass without pins. Ruth was surprised that I showed less interest in

Emily’s big, bright, tropical morphos and birdwings than in the little brown jobs from Orcas. After her death, Harley gave me the three mounts of Washington specimens that will soon make their home in the Oregon State Arthropod Collection. Sadly, much of the rest of the collection was destroyed in a house fire in 2014.

In the 1930s and 1940s, two couples were active here—Grace and John Sperry and

Ruth and Arthur Svihla. Both pairs collected largely in the Olympics, visiting locations unsampled before or since. The Sperrys were leading lepidopterists and naturalists from Riverside, California, and the Svihlas collected bryophytes and other plants around the world for museums. A recent subspecies description honored its probable first captors with the epithet Euphydryas colon svihlae Pelham.

The following decades go mostly quiet on the subject. In the fifties, Barbara Laudan collected in Southwest Washington, later reporting a possible sight record of a Buckeye in Longview in 1953. In the early sixties, things began to pick up.

Sigrid Shepard did field work with Jon Shepard, initiating a fecund partnership that continues to this day, and later co-authoring the section on parnassians in W. J. Howe’s Butterflies of North America. JoAnne Clark Pyle (later Heron) similarly collaborated in the author’s earliest Washington butterfly investigations. His longtime collecting partner and mother, Denver lepidopterist Helen Lee Lemmon, made influential visits in 1964 and 1967, sparking Pyle’s determination to study the state’s butterflies in depth. Later the same summer, Pelham’s mother, Elizabeth Pelham, took Pelham and Pyle on their first collecting trip together to Bear Canyon, leading to all manner of mayhem ever since.

One more decade saw further advances. In 1974 and ’75, Sally Hughes partnered in the author’s doctoral research on Washington butterfly ecogeography, in the process dis- covering the Makah Copper (Tharsalea {formerly Lycaena} mariposa makah Pyle & Hammond), which in another and more just world would be named “Tharsalea mariposa sallya”. In January, 1979, longtime WSU Cooperative Extension Agent, insect educator and researcher Sharon Collman formally revived the insect study and social group, the Scarabs. (Scarabs had thrived in Seattle from 1937 to 1974, when founder and High Scarab, Professor Melville Hatch retired. Several of its most active members had been UW women). Collman bridged the old Scarabs and the new, encouraging the study and enjoyment of butterflies and all insects, and later publishing an influential Extension booklet, The Butterflies of Lowland King County, in 1986. Arachnologist Bea Vogel and her lepidopterist daughter Megan were among the New Scarabs who pursued butterflies and their study.

Even so, as Pelham and Pyle, with their surviving elder mentors, got things rolling toward a new push and a book, we knew almost no women involved in butterfly study in the state. But things were about to change, big time…and a landscape was coming that those callow young collectors would hardly recognize. The era of butterfly studies as an old boys’ (and young boys’) club was almost over, and all to the good. How that came about, and where we are now, will be the story for next time.

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