WDFW -- Crossing Paths Newsletter

Butterfly watching gaining popularity
(excerpted in part from Cox NewsService and Spokesman-Review stories)

Tip of the season:

Leave nestboxes up through the winter. Some of Washington’s resident species, like woodpeckers and chickadees, are known to use them as protected night roosting spots. Just be sure to clean them out and repair them in March for the next nest builders.

Move over, birders. Trails and paths that are filled with bird-watchers on weekends are becoming popular with another breed of nature observers: butterfly-watchers. In fact, butterfly-watching closely parallels bird-watching, and it is rapidly gaining popularity across the country. “Wild Bird” magazine calls butterflies “the next wave of watchable wildlife.”

Some experts say butterfly-watching now is where bird-watching was 20 years ago, but rapidly catching up. The North American Butterfly Association was founded in 1992 and now has 4,000 members and 30 chapters nationwide.

There are no specific figures on the number of all butterfly watchers, but there are about 15,000 butterfly species known in the world, nearly 200 of them in the Pacific Northwest. Washington’s own butterfly expert Robert Michael Pyle chronicles all of those local species in his new (and 15th!) book “The Butterflies of Cascadia,’’ (Seattle Audubon, $29.95), a spectacular guide to the butterflies of Washington, Oregon and surrounding areas.

Another new book is available for almost half the cost and is adequate for casual butterfly observers. “The Guide To Butterflies of Oregon and Washington,’’ by William Neill (Westcliffe, $17.95) is a clear and concise guide with a good photo of each of the 100 species described .

But “The Butterflies of Cascadia’’ tackles the subject in more breadth and depth, covering all the species and subspecies known in the Pacific Northwest. Several photos are shown for each species to illustrate different color phases and Pyle includes his personal insights and essays on what they mean to him after years of study.

“Butterflies are neither minted like coins nor printed like stamps: they are the products of parents with differing traits, and therefore each one is an original,’’ writes Pyle.

Pyle also encourages people to invite butterflies into their yards by cultivating plants specifically to lure them. “At the alpha level,” Pyle said, “this merely involves growing nectar plants for attracting adults. The more satisfying beta level will lead you to include caterpillar host plants, in hopes that your garden will actually provide breeding habitat for visiting species.’’

Butterflies are really two distinct types of animals during their lives.

“They begin active life as crawling, chewing, worm-like neuters,” Pyle writes, “and finish as flying, sucking, highly sexual creatures.’’

Their larval needs encompass greenery such as leaves. Sometimes the needs are very specific, as with the Monarch’s dependence on milkweed.

But food is not the only habitat requirement for any of the butterfly’s stages.

“Most species hibernate as egg, small caterpillar, or chrysalis, withstanding the cold through physiological adaptations,’’ Pyle writes. But a few species can weather winter in some portions of the Pacific Northwest as adults. They rely on habitat factors we don’t normally associate with butterflies, such as the type of holes cavity-nesting birds require.

“They come out on warm days, so if you see a mourning cloak or satyr angelwing on New Year’s or Valentine’s day, you won’t be hallucinating.’’ Pyle writes.

Flower nectar, the adult butterfly’s primary food, is only one of its habitat needs. They also like rotting fruit, running sap, and the honeydew of aphids. Males sometimes get down and dirty, lured in swarms called “mud-puddle clubs” to probe mud and damp sand for dissolved mineral salts, especially where some animal has urinated.

“Butterflies, mostly males, also throng to carrion and scat, attracted by the smell of decomposing materials rich in the amino acids and other organic compounds they need,” writes Pyle. “The sight of ethereal butterflies sucking up to roadkill, bear poop or horse pee turns Ms. Millay’s verse on its head,’’ he writes.

In the poem “Mariposa,” Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote, “Mark the transient butterfly / How he hangs upon the flower.”