Watching Washington Butterflies With Bob Pyle: Number Sixteen

In the late fall, my dear, longtime friend, wife, and field companion, Thea, finally succumbed after a decade of courageous and graceful coexistence with ovarian cancer. Thea was much beloved of many in the butterfly and moth community, and far beyond. They remember her as cheerful, positive, intelligent, thoughtful, kind, and uncommonly lovely-both her unforgettable smile and her whole presence; and as a quiet, calming, sheer delight to be with. Everyone who met Thea wanted to know her better. This cannot be said of many!

Thea was born in Seattle on September 3, 1947; grew up on Mercer Island; lived in Seattle, Portland, Cheyenne, Chelan, Wenatchee, and Gray’s River; and died in Astoria on November 20, 2013. Her son Tom and wife Iliana live on Lake Chapala, Jalisco, Mexico, and daughter Dory and husband Jeb in North Portland. Their children-David, Cristina, Edward, and Francis-all loved butterflying (or doing anything else) with their Grandma Thea.

Thea’s many contributions were felt as a fine artist, community volunteer and activist, and plantswoman (both in the garden and the woods), among other involvements. But I want to devote this column to Thea’s life as a lepidopterist. As a 1969 graduate of the University of Washington in botany, Thea’s primary focus in natural history was always plants and fungi (we met in a mushroom class in 1967, and mushrooms-especially chanterelles and morels- remained among her keenest delights for the rest of her life). However, she loved all aspects of natural history (see http://www.willapahillsaudubon.org/media/whistler/2014-1.pdf ). As my friend of 46 years, partner for 30, and wife of 28 years, it was perhaps inevitable that Thea would be drawn to butterflies, and make a notable mark in their study.

During her years in Chelan County, Thea became well acquainted with the narrowly endemic Thompson’s Clover (Trifolium thompsonii), the huge-flowered, magenta-colored clover whose entire world distribution is restricted to the area around Swakane Canyon. She photographed a Two-tailed Tiger Swallowtail nectaring on it and sent me the slide, back in the seventies. We always intended to conspire on an article about this highly restricted plant and its insects, but the busy years intervened.

Much later, when both single, we finally visited the clover together. That day turned out to be the beginning of our courtship. We never wrote the article, but we did find a colony of Greenish Blues both nectaring on the clover and using it as their larval hostplant in Swakane. A subsequent trip to Thompson’s Clover and its habitat became the first Swakane Canyon (later Chumstick Mountain) Fourth of July Butterfly Count, conducted by Thea, Tom, Dory, and me. It is pleasant to think that both this venerable and productive 4JBC, and our 28-year marriage, grew out of that first tiptoe through the clover together.

While Thea was still living in Wenatchee, before coming over to Gray’s River in 1984, she kept an eye (and a net) out for butterflies on my behalf. In the process, she came up with two new county records-a real challenge in well- collected Chelan County. First, she salvaged a soggy skipper out of Tom and Dory’s wading pool that proved to be the county record Sandhill Skipper (Polites sabuleti). Next, she found the county’s first reported monarch at her favorite wild asparagus-hunting ground: Gallagher Flats, a backwater bottom cut off from the Columbia River by SR 97, north of Chelan. This discovery, and the good stand of showy milkweed that went along with it, led me to spend a significant (and productive) time there during my Chasing Monarchs quest in 1996. We went back many times, finding a good range of butterfly species, including colonies of both Acmon Blues and Mormon Metalmarks on snow buckwheat.

Thea was always the one to spot the great stuff, and she had other county records. But she also logged three personal state records-all the same species, in three different states! First, while I was teaching a family nature class at Big Sky resort in Montana, Thea roamed with her net and collected a series of tiny golden skippers by the horse corral. Never mind that Thymelicus lineola, the introduced European Skipperling, would fairly swarm in the Little Blackfoot River country during my 2008 Butterfly Big Year, these of Thea’s were the very first to turn up in Montana. The following summer, visiting her sister’s camp at Cascade, Idaho, Thea swung her net in the lush mountain meadows around McCall and Payette Lake. Again she spotted tiny golden skippers, and although the similar Garita Skipperling was also present, she picked out Europeans-a new state record for Idaho. (I’m not sure the resident Montana and Idaho collectors were amused at this Washington botanist finding new butterflies for their state lists beneath their noses! But they later con- firmed Thea’s finds with additional records.) Finally, we had been seeking T. lineola for years around the borders of Washington. A lover of Timothy grass whose eggs overwinter and therefore can easily be transported in hay bales, the skipperling can theoretically turn up wherever hayfields prosper. I’ve told the tale of this discovery in WWB # 4 in the February, 2011 issue of G’Num. Suffice it to say here that we finally found it, just south of the B.C. border along a pow- erline right-of-way. As Thea went in for the first catch to preserve her streak, she tripped over a hidden cable. But she bounced right back up and nabbed her third state record for the species. I wonder whether anyone else has ever copped three state records for the same species, at least in modern times? Had she lived, I don’t doubt she would have added Oregon eventually, boosting her trifecta to a grand slam.

Thea garnered another state record, when we went in search of Eriogonum nudum and the Dotted Blue that feeds on it, Euphilotes enoptes (also told in WWB # 4). We’d found the host at last, a big stand of it in early bloom along the Tieton River’s West Fork. We parked, and I paused for a quick lunch. Thea went straight to the buckwheat, and before I could take a bite, she’d nabbed the first one ever taken in Washington.

But two of Thea’s most significant records lay far outside Washington’s bounds. In the first case, we had co-led a butter- fly-&-bird trip to southern Arizona with master naturalist Mark Garland in the fall if 1999. I had to depart before the last day for a job up north, so Thea took the reins. As the group lunched in the ramada atop the Mexican border lookout at Coronado National Memorial, Thea noticed several butterflies perching and basking on the frame. “I’ve never seen that kind before!” she said to Mark, and he agreed. As Coronado is a National Park Service unit, they could not use their nets. But one of the insects was temporarily and harmlessly detained with forceps, so it could be photographed well: on- ly the second record of the Dusky Emperor (Asterocampa idyja) north of Mexico, and the first ever photographed in the United States. Jeff Glassberg arrived to take its picture within days, and Thea’s butterfly (or one of its cohort) graced the cover of American Butterflies.

Then, in December of 2008, Thea and I were all but wrapping up the Butterfly Big Year in Hawaii. Just the previous March, Jim Snyder had discovered a new (alien) butterfly for the Hawaiian list on Oahu: Zizina otis, the Lesser Grass Blue. We were on Kauai, looking for the native Hawaiian butterflies, Blackburn’s Bluet and the Kameamea. But first, we were waiting for a farmers’ market to open in Lihue, so we could buy a pineapple. We’d just obtained a cold drink in a mall. Then, quoting from Mariposa Road: “As we climbed … past a grassy slope, Thea said, ‘I think I saw a Pygmy Blue.’ …Then we noticed more vegetation across the lot, beyond K-Mart’s Dumpster pen. Several of the blues flitted over the far slope, too big and too blue to be Pygmies. I realized then that they must be Lesser Grass Blues.” This was only the second find in the islands, and the first for the island of Kauai-all because Thea spotted that tiny flicker out behind a shopping center on a hot and humid afternoon in Lihue. Later, we would see scads of them in Honolulu, and Thea would make another range extension by spotting one roosting at dusk below Diamond Head, on a little pink weed called Emelia, or Cupid’s Shaving Brush. I would see the same plant a few days later in the Florida Keys, but with Ceraunus Blues on board instead.

It is just this uncanny degree of spotfulness that was Thea’s most salient feature as a lepidopterist, and as a naturalist in general. As her friend and fellow botanist Kathleen Sayce, with whom Thea studied Spartina on Long Island, put it: “Being in the field with Thea was always about being taught to see-it wasn’t that I could not see plants, birds, butter- flies-it was that Thea saw everything, so quickly, so clearly.” Together with her keen sense of how plants and creatures work together, this trait made her an excellent field worker. On two contracts we held with the National Park Service for butterfly surveys in Olympic and San Juan Historic national parks, Thea detected many of the most important species and their host- and nectar plants.

Her observational acuity was simply breathtaking, as anyone who’s been afield with her would agree. It was a running joke among my repeat students that if you wanted to see the best stuff, you stuck around Thea; and it was entirely true! It was always Thea who would pick out the beautiful but cryptic green Clark’s Sphinx moth, as well as the green hair- streaks, from the general green chaos on our Sun Mountain butterfly courses. I remember how once, near Tiger, Thea spotted a Northern Crescent caterpillar on a fleabane as we were driving past at 20 mph! Indeed, she was better at finding immatures than anyone I know (Dave McCorkle and possibly Dave Nunnallee excepted) and she often picked out roosting butterflies on stormy days. On my fiftieth birthday, on Silver Star Mountain, she found three species of butter- flies bedded down for the night, with a flashlight; and again in Guatemala, she spotted an 88 Butterfly hunkered down at roost, at dawn’s first light. These kinds of events were typical for Thea, as when she espied both the first and the latest California Sisters of the several that have visited our Gray’s River garden, both at some distance and against variegated patterns of foliage. Her powers of perception were simply preternatural, and she often put them to work finding butterflies, as well as her beloved chanterelles.

A superb artist widely admired for her silkscreens of wildflowers and other prints, Thea usually resisted depicting butterflies. However, I talked her into making linocuts of butterflies for the title pages of two of my books, most of which are graced by her art. The monarch-on-a-milkweed-pod motif on Chasing Monarchs, and the Harvester on Mariposa Road, both show that she had the measure of insects as well as wildflowers. In these images, her new records, her fine butterfly garden, and in much else, she has made a positive difference to our butterfly landscape. But her greatest contribution was her own sweet presence among the other denizens of the wild, flowered places, and her absence from our company will be profoundly missed.

A Celebration of Life for Thea Linnaea Pyle will take place on Saturday, April 26, in Gray’s River, WA. It will be an open house at Thea and Bob Pyle’s historic home, Swede Park, near the Gray’s River Covered Bridge, from 11-5. All are welcome. Parking will be at Ahlberg Park beside the covered bridge, with a shuttle provided for those who need it.

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