Watching Washington Butterflies with Bob Pyle: Number Thirty One

I concluded my previous column, “Bob’s Big Birthday Butterfly Bash,” like this: “Having found well over a third of the Washington butterflies in our single week in northeast Washington, David Branch and I (over a glass or two of The Macallan) rashly decided to undertake the first Washington Butterfly Big Year: stretching from July 15, 2017 to July 15, 2018, instead of the usual January 1-January 1. Why not? “, and asked you to “Stay tuned!”

So in this follow-up essay, I shall report on how the rest of the season has gone, ultimately sealing my report on the first half of Washington’s First Butterfly Big Year.

The next opportunity to go afield came over the first weekend of September, when I rejoined my Butterfly Big Year companion David Branch at his mountain house in Roslyn. In a long-planned gambit, we were further joined there by Jonathan Pelham. The first afternoon was for specimen exam from our big outing in Ferry and Okanogan counties. Jon confirmed most of our IDs, but stripped our list of a couple of species for which I had come down on the wrong side of ambiguous IDs. But he who takes also gives, and an anglewing I’d thought to be a dark female Polygonia satyrus Jon adjudged to be the unfamiliar (to me) purplish race of P. oreas, ssp. threatfuli. Chalk one up! Beer was involved, and some seriously good cooking, and billiards.

The morning of September 3 came thick and grim with smoke, and a Stage II evacuation warning from the Jolly Mountain Fire too close to the north. As we three plus Loke the Butterfly Dog headed out, we hoped there would be a home to return to. The thing with a butterfly big year is that you have to be attentive to the passing seasons and their fading faunas, because they will not be back again until your year has come and gone. There aren’t many exclusively autumn butterflies, but we had to see them now, or not at all. I’d already spotted Pine Whites and found the one egg of the Golden Hairstreak. That pretty much left the Mormon Metalmark: this would be our one chance to find it. The thick smoke all around cooled the day and put our success in doubt. Here’s where Professor Pelham came in. Most of my reliable spots for Mormons were much farther east, but he had a favorite site for them up Reecer Canyon, northeast of Ellensburg. We no sooner got there, and stepped out into the sere, smoky, desiccated land- scape, than bright little metalmarks popped up all around. The slender stalks and tiny blossoms of Eriogonum elatum host a grand population here, and they were on good dis- play, with several other species.

I hated to break up our merry company, but relieved to have checked off Apodemia mormo, I left the boys to it and headed south and east down the Columbia. It was hot and still, and I stopped for a Fudgesicle in the Latin town of Mattawa. There I beheld the greatest butterfly spectacle I’ve seen since I was last among the Monarchs in Mexico: tens of thousands of Orange and Clouded Sulphurs circling, rising, flirting, and falling among the pre-harvest fields of alfalfa. And the day closed out under the Vernita Bridge, with a fine spectacle of Monarchs and Viceroys thronging the brilliant nectar banks of purple loosestrife: a troublesome invasive perhaps, but essential to the survival of migrating Monarchs in Washington, as David James has shown.

The next day, after camping at Prosser, I crossed the bleak agricultural barren of the Horse Heaven Hills, relieved only by the occasional wandering Becker’s White. What a relief to rejoin the Big River at Paterson, and step out into a moist and verdant thicket of bright nectar plants all along the shore: several native composites, mallows, mints, and others, though once again most of the nectaring action-Monarchs, Viceroys, Gray Hairstreaks, Painted Ladies, and Cabbage Whites (including one cutie the size of a copper)-took place among the avenues of purple loosestrife. Much of the ground was carpeted in the alkaline-loving salt- grass (Distichlis spicata), much beloved hostplant of Sandhill Skippers, which I dearly hoped to find here; but nary a one was to be seen. That’s the other thing about a Big Year: you can lead a lepidopterist to the right habitat and hostplants, but you can’t make him or her find the desired butterfly. Now there was just time to get west to Roosevelt, to spot some more Monarchs at the reliable locale I named “The Fish Patch” in Chasing Monarchs. Once again, it didn’t let me down.

Now, I thought that by traveling so far south, I’d escape the smoke. But fires were region-wide, and as I westered down the Gorge after sunset, the skies only seemed to thicken toward Mt. Hood. What followed was a truly hellish trip home through the margins of the Eagle Creek Fire, just then raging, through the worst traffic imaginable, as all of I-84 was detoured onto little SR-14 on the Washington side. Between the raging red inferno on my left and the chaos of the insufficient road, I wasn’t at all sure my little 1982 Honda, Powdermilk, with her 432,000 miles, would make it home at all.

You can read my account about that shocking night.

The next opportunity for a field foray came on September 27, and took the form of a double remembrance: fifty years that month since my mother, a great collecting pal, had died; and fifty years to the day since Thea and I had first met in a mushroom class at the UW. My target was the western blast zone of Mt. St. Helens, on the way up to Johnston Ridge. There, on a September 3rd outing for Thea’s birthday some years earlier, we had found the recovering ashfields thickly tufted with Pearly Everlasting-both the caterpillar hostplant for the American Painted Lady, and a potent nectar source for that and many other species. And, lo! We had indeed found Vanessa virginiensis-not one, or two, but in the dozens! That was the only time this species had ever been reported as common in Washington butterfly history. So I had high hopes on this sunny day, even if it was three weeks later. But you know, nothing stays the same, especially in a rapidly evolving geological landscape. First, those everlasting fields hadn’t lasted, and were now alder scrub. Second, the USFS no longer maintained a trail onto the blast zone, and any similar habitat was off limits. All I found were a couple of California Tortoiseshells hilltopping on Johnston Ridge, a tail-end Woodland Skipper or two, and a French couple who couldn’t figure out how to get their rented van out of Park. But a fine day afield it had been (and isn’t that the main thing, after all?), full of warm memories of Helen Lee and Thea.

Lastly, I headed for the eastern Gorge one more time on October 16-17. Camping at Stonehenge, I lay on the altar stone in mild air beneath the Milky Way, Orion rising be- tween two standing stones. Morning came cold and bright, and I saw right away that the rabbitbrush was in excellent shape with loads of nectar in the bright yellow heads. My aim was to find Juba and Sandhill Skippers, and from the outset this seemed entirely doable. After breakfast in Biggs, I walked the BNSF maintenance road between the tracks and the river downstream from US 97, below Maryhill Mansion. There were buckets of bunnybrush and snow buckwheat in bloom, along with some asters. As soon as it was warm enough, butterflies began to appear: a Cabbage White, a fresh Red Admirable, a couple of diminutive but brilliant Acmon Blues on the pink g’num, and one barely postemergent female Monarch, tanking up on Chrysothamnus nectar before tackling the Columbia. (This was exactly where I had watched a Monarch actually cross the Columbia on my big monarch chase in 1996.) Across SR 97 next to Maryhill State Park, purple heads of vetch and alfalfa contributed lots of Orange and Clouded Sulphurs and fresh Sa- chem Skippers of both sexes. But two big beautiful beds of zinnias and tithonias in Maryhill village, usually absolute magnets for anything Vanessa, produced not a single painted lady of any species-just a Cabbage, a male Monarch, and more Sachems.

I was beginning to get worried, as the day bore on. And so I should have: driving all the way east to the Fish Patch again and beyond even unto Plymouth to cross to the 84 at Umatilla, I checked hundreds and hundreds of golden rabbitbrushes. And they did bear thousands of lepidopterans! Virtually all of them Celery Loopers (Anagrapha falcifera) and one or two other species of day-flying plusiine moths. The handsome, metal-marked loopers are having a heckuva year, common at my buddleia in Gray’s River, too. But they sure made it hard to spot skippers-or they would have, had there been any skippers to spot. But there weren’t, not a one- Juba, Sandhill, Woodland, or Colorado. In my experience, October rabbitbrush almost always produces big hunky Jubas, sometimes en masse. But not this year…not during the Big Year! Why? Maybe the cold, wet spring left them low, but who knows. I do know we’ll have a job to find these species in the spring. But it can be done, and David and I will be out there trying!

Tally for the first half of the Big Year: 70 species of 155 possible. Best finds: Variegated Fritillary (State Record Voucher) and Egleis (= Great Basin) Fritillary (County Record) in Ferry County.

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