The sun finally came out. The first Clodius Parnassians of the year burst out of the vegetation on all sides. Pale Tiger Swallowtails, Western Meadow Fritillaries, and Margined Whites cruised the roadside. An early Lorquin’s Admiral appeared out of thin air, and a late Spring Azure rose up the slope into Ocean Spray. Suddenly a bronzy little skipper materialized flittered past my feet, and I determined to find it.

A remarkable, sunny April had seen eight species of butterflies in our Gray’s River garden, unprecedented so early, but May came cloudy and cool. The first bright day of June, you couldn’t keep me in. I was crossing northern Pacific County via the remarkably isolated village of Brooklyn. As the delinquent sun warmed the morning, I paused at a seepy roadcut beneath a recovering clearcut, where the impatient butterflies were making up for lost time. But where was that skipper?

For many butterfliers, documenting distribution makes up a major part of our fun. When you spot a creature beyond its previously known range, you add a new quantum of natural history knowledge. Acquiring range data also makes for stimulating sport. Each datum of occurrence is a record. Finding new county records is something of a big deal among those who care, and a new state record is a really big deal. But this is not just about personal achievement; new finds come from chance at least as often as acumen. It is about participation in the great and worthy enterprise of documenting our butterfly fauna in time and space. What could be more important, if we care about conservation? You cannot conserve something if you don’t know where it occurs.

I practice a kind of butterfly science called biogeography-the study of organisms’ whereabouts. Learning why a species occurs here and not there, then doing something about it, forms a cornerstone of conservation biology. In the early ’70s, I studied with John Heath, originator of the Biological Records Centre’s butterfly recording scheme at the Monks Wood Experimental Station in England. The detailed dot-maps that grew out of this project (involving thousands of amateur recorders) led to the restoration of several declining species. A recent paper in the prestigious journal Science, based on thirty years of BRC butterfly data, concluded that we are now well embarked on the world’s sixth great extinction event, as demonstrated by the British butterfly trends.

So you see how important records can be. But records must be accurate to be useful, and inaccurate records are worse than none. This is because the basic unit of biogeography is the dot on the map. If our faith in the reliability of dots is shaken by the reporting of bad records, the whole system falls apart

— for if any one dot is unreliable, how can you trust all the others? For this reason, Lepidoptera recorders have set the bar high for acceptable records, and rightly so: a soft standard leads to bad maps, which give a distorted sense of any given species’ distribution-meaning lost opportunities for critical protection.

This is why conservationists and scientists so vigorously oppose the practice of butterfly transfers and releases for weddings and other events. When people toss butterflies around the countryside willy nilly, recorders have no way of knowing whether a particular record is reliable or not. The first San Juan Island Monarchs were recorded last year, but we have no way of knowing whether they were natural or introduced by a misguided wedding party or a well- intentioned school class. If we cannot trust Monarch records, how can we understand their migration, and how to conserve it? Likewise, the release of thousands of Painted Ladies by schools has ruined our understanding of that species’ complex movements. A worthy future project for WBA would be to work with Washington teachers to provide locally originating butterflies for classroom use.

Historically, an acceptable record required a voucher specimen deposited in a recognized collection. This remains the most reliable way to verify data. Recorders reject many sight records for the simple reason that we all make tentative calls and even outright guesses on our sightings. Hopefulness can easily inspire an unwarranted state of certainty: we see what we want to see, be it Bigfoot or butterfly. A wrong call does no harm on a personal day list, but if it lands in the formal data files, our understanding and response to population trends can be seriously impaired.  Without a voucher, no one can go back and check the record after the fact. But with the rise of butterfly watching, many spotters have neither the means nor the desire to collect specimens. And while collecting very seldom damages insect populations, listed species and small populations call for restraint. It would be sad to miss out on the bonanza of new data from watchers as they outnumber catchers; but it would be disastrous to flood the data base with uncertain and sometimes mistaken data points. How to cope with this paradox?

Fortunately, alternatives exist. A good photograph can often take the place of the voucher specimen. Catch-and-release is another option, giving a definitive look without hurting the insect. As for sight records, the same rules apply for butterflies as for rare birds: acceptance requires a very good look, detailed notes for examination, and usually a second observer. But don’t expect sight records, or even photographs, to take the place of vouchers for difficult groups such as Euphilotes blues, certain skippers, or the most inscrutable checkerspots.

So who vets and keeps the records? Since the 1960s, Jon Shepard, Jon Pelham, John Hinchliff and I have been gathering records generated over the past century-plus. These led to Hinchliff’s excellent atlases of Oregon and Washington butterflies and to the maps in The Butterflies of Cascadia. Today, Ann Potter coordinates the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife’s digital database. Everyone with supportable data is encouraged to submit records annually to Ann. A proper record includes the date, the observer/collector/photographer, whereabouts of the voucher or photographs and notes, and the precise locality with township, range, and section or lat/long coordinates. Using your record, another person should be able to return to the very same place.

At last I saw it: an Arctic Skipper, instantly recognizable by its ornate gold and silver orbs, nectaring on a freshly bloomed thistle. Though I was just a third of a mile from Gray’s Harbor County, it was a Pacific County record. A little way over the line, I netted a big Silver-spotted Skipper, another county record, and happily released the fresh female heavy with eggs. The day continued hot as I skipped from habitat to habitat, bagging lots of records and many unforgettable visions. What fun!

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