Watching Washington Butterflies With Bob Pyle: Number One

So what to call such a series? Why not go back to the beginning, I thought, and resurrect the serviceable name of my first book, Watching Washington Butterflies (Seattle Audubon Society, 1974)? Perhaps not all of our members know that President Wagar was on my College of Forest Resources faculty committee when I wrote that book as my master’s thesis at the UW in the early seventies. He was tough, insisting that I get the science right and keep the poetry in bounds; after all, it was a Master of Science degree. He held me up for an extra term after a year abroad studying butterfly conservation, but that enabled me to live in a houseboat for spring quarter, an ambition I’d held all through college. It’s a delight to me that all these years later we’ve both come together over the love of butterflies.

I might as well stick with the question of names for a beginning. Why do we call a given butterfly by a given name? Naturalists and biologists have, over the centuries, adopted a series of conventions to guide naming choices, to facilitate discovery, and to clarify communication. Vernacular (common) names have no official arbiter, though NABA provides a useful list of recommended names, as has the Xerces Society. Standardization has its benefits, but colloquial and regional usage can be colorful and worth preserving–so the American painted lady is known in some quarters as the Virginia Lady, and in others as Hunter’s Butterfly. Yet the standard scientific name Vanessa virginiensis, covers all the English Names. In The Butterflies of Cascadia, under a.k.a., I gave all the names used for each species.

Scientific names are regulated by the International Commission of Zoological Nomenclature. ICZN provides certain helpful conventions of usage. For example, all taxonomic levels (taxa) are always capitalized, except for species and subspecies; the genus, species, and subspecies are italicized, but no other taxa. So: Lepidoptera, Nymphalidae, Vanessa, virginiensis. These conventions give consistency.

It sometimes seems that scientists change names for the fun of it, as if to befuddle amateurs (an honorable state: the word means “one who loves”). But name changes actually reflect greater understanding of relationships, often revealed through anatomical or genetic (DNA) investigations. We are fortunate to have the leading scholar of the history of American butterfly names as our WBA guru, Jon Pelham. Jonathan’s stupendous Catalogue of the Butterflies of the United States and Canada is the indispensable source for exactly which names apply, how they came to be recognized, and who is responsible for their study and description. The Catalogue‘s entries often read like historical mysteries, whose solution helps us to appreciate the actual people upon whom our knowledge of butterflies depends: Boisduval, Lorquin, Edwards, Scudder, Burdick, Austin, Warren, and so on.

The fact is, butterflies (and any other organisms) become much more interesting if we take the trouble to understand WHY they are called WHAT they are called. Also, don’t you find that you care about your neighbors more, if you know who they are? Conservation in this and other countries would be leagues ahead of where it is if the general populace had even a nodding relationship with more than a few of our non-human neighbors. 

The Washington Butterfly Association can be seen as a brother- and sisterhood of initiates into the wonders, mysteries, and pleasures of close acquaintance with butterflies. So when you encounter the first echo azures, margined whites, tortoiseshells, and anglewings (a.k.a. commas) this spring, ask yourself why they are known as they are; learn a scientific name or two; when a name changes, instead of cursing the taxonomists, celebrate the advance in our understanding; and go happily and upright into the field, knowing that your are helping to keep knowledge alive. Names are how we get to know and love the individual parts that keep the world running, and keep it worth living in.

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