NATURAL HISTORY

Butterflies! Stand Up and Be Counted

Text by Elizabeth Pennisi On the road up Redrock Canyon, Doug Danforth slams on the brakes, jerking his Land Cruiser to a halt. He jumps out and runs to the back of the car. He's just in time to see an orange butterfly flitting to a perch high above the vehicle. Squinting, he tries to pick out its wing markings, but he is too late. The insect has eluded identification by the seventh-grade science teacher. Then, moving away from the road a bit, he freezes. Slowly he inches up to a small green bush, crouching low to the ground so he can look under the wings of a small butterfly on a leaf. A few seconds later, he stands and smiles. “A hairstreak. That's one we haven't seen today.” Danforth calls out genus and species to wildlife biologist Tom Deecken, who adds the sighting to the tally sheet. Before sunrise this morning, Danforth and Deecken met with nine others at Patagonia's Stage Stop Motel for breakfast, the kickoff for the Xerces Society Annual Butterfly Count, one of three in Arizona. There are about 90 such counts nationwide. Led by Tucson high school math teacher Richard Bailowitz, the Arizona counters spend their August Saturdays in Patagonia, 20 miles northeast of Nogales; at Ramsey Canyon near Sierra Vista; and in the Atascosa Highlands, 15 miles west of Nogales. Their quest is cataloging and counting each area's butterflies, from the half-inch pygmy blue to the half-foot giant whites and two-tailed swallowtails; from the dull brown skipper to the gaudy hairstreak that has an iridescent blue topside, a green and red underwing, and an orange fringe along the wing edge. The counters' trek carries them across canyons, alfalfa fields, streams, woods, washes, and flatlands; the more varied the terrain, the more varied the butterflies. It takes but a day for a novice observer to appreciate this subtle creature as one of Nature's most striking.

The Xerces Society, a nonprofit organization based in Portland, Oregon, and dedicated to the preservation of invertebrates, started counting butterflies in 1975. That year about 60 persons conducted surveys in 20 locations. Arizonans began counting butterflies in 1980. By 1988, 500 people in 25 states and two Canadian provinces were participating, according to Paul Opler, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service entomologist in Grand Junction, Colorado, who coordinates the data collection.

"By looking at all the counts over the years, we can see trends," says Opler. Plus the counts make people more aware of these insects and their loss from urbanized areas.

The surveys are modeled after the Audubon winter bird counts, a 24-hour tally of birds in a 15-mile-wide circle. But winter is a bad time for butterflies, so, in most of the country, the surveys take place between June 11 and July 31. In Arizona, however, counts are held in August, the desert's rainy season, when thriving plants provide fodder and egg-laying sites for the creatures. At breakfast, Bailowitz sliced Patagonia's 15-mile-wide area into wedges, each of which he assigned to crews of one to four persons. "The idea is to cover as much territory as you can," explains Erich Draeger, a butterfly counter for three years. That can be quite a challenge. To survey the loftiest point around Patagonia, called Red Mountain, elevation 6,363 feet, one counter hiked up the peak the previous night.

Bailowitz's crews treat the survey not just as a count but as a competition: Arizona versus California, Texas, and Colorado. Arizona is home to more than 300 butterfly species, a diversity Texas might beat but California or Colorado can only approach. Arizona's mix of climates and habitats sustains butterflies from such surrounding regions as Mexico, California, and the Rocky Mountains. "Oddly enough, there are Eastern butterflies here that are apparently absent from much of the Great Plains," says Bailowitz.

Arizona's viceroys and red-spotted purples are to butterfly-watchers what Eastern bluebirds and Eastern meadowlarks are to bird-watchers visiting from the East familiar species in a strange land.

Then, too, there are species that Bailowitz calls "southeastern Arizona specialties." One, Terlootii's white, baffles most novices. Males are white with black lines on the wings; females are orange and black. "If you saw them flying around, you wouldn't think they were the same species."

Thanks to this diversity, Bailowitz boasts that on one count, 97 butterfly species were spotted, one short of the national record. Today Bailowitz wonders whether by getting to a hilltop earlier or hiking deeper into a canyon, census takers might come across that unusual butterfly a stray from Mexico or a relic from an age when Arizona was cooler that will prove the state has the most diverse butterfly community in the country.

Deecken scans the overcast sky, hoping the clouds will break. He and Danforth halt at a hilltop expecting to find great blue hairstreak males gathered, waiting for females. But the sun is hidden and so are the butterflies. Earlier the counters had wasted an hour digging their vehicle out of the mud, and now rain threatens to send their quarry into hiding. "It's hard to know what to do when the weather is like this," Deecken says. He and Danforth try to second-guess the weather and the butterflies. They try to decide whether to go up canyon or head back to town where the sun is still shining when a large yellow-green butterfly flutters overhead: a cloudless sulfur. It is searching for nectar and suitable places to lay eggs.

Later its eggs will hatch into caterpillars, which are little more than feeding machines. Those caterpillars then metamorphose into the delicate winged creatures that are the subject of these counts. Although the sulfur may try to breed here, the species cannot survive the area's cold winters. So any specimens sighted each year are ones that have drifted in from Mexico. This particular butterfly is headed for vegetation colored like itself. There it will hang upside down so the rain cannot knock it off.

Decision made, the two men climb into The Land Cruiser and race the clouds back to Patagonia, where they hope to have better luck in local gardens, especially those with lantana, zinnia, and marigolds, which are especially attractive to butterflies. Meanwhile, at the lowest elevation of the survey area, Draeger leads two newcomers to the count up a dry wash. Though entomologists at the University of Arizona in Tucson, they are novices with the butterfly net. One is an ant expert. The other studies the nervous system of insects. When the first orange butterfly flits past them, they swing their nets wildly several times and miss their quarry, which disappears among the thorny branches of a mesquite tree. "You have to be a little rambunctious with the net," Draeger advises, as he twirls his net and snags a sleepy orange sulfur. The clouds scud away from the area, and soon the counters see more butterflies than they can track.

"I see a queen." "Mexican sulfur." "Did you see that Philenor?" "Two more chara," a voice calls out from behind some bushes.

By noon the two entomologists have mastered their nets but still have to look up most of their catches in their field guides. A few hours later, though fatigued, thirsty, and dusty, they return to the road, field guides stuffed into their backpacks.

By now they know on sight all but a few of the species they see.

"After a while, you develop a sense for the way certain ones fly," says Draeger. "Consequently, you can spot things pretty easily." The California sister, for example, flaps its wings a few times, then glides. Other species zig and zag as if in a drunken stupor. If you spot a pair of butterflies in a dogfight between two hackberry trees, chances are they are Asterocampa leilia. Territorial by nature, these butterflies will dive-bomb other butterflies, even people, who come too close. Amblyscirtes nysa often basks on the open road after sunrise but in early morning heads for cooler, more sheltered spots. Celotes nessus, on the other hand, prefers to perch on hot rocks when the sun is highest, no matter how warm the day. Butterflies often are easier to spot when they are airborne. Even when he catches sight of them out the corner of his eye, Danforth homes in on telltale insignia on the wings. The white wings of the common cabbage butterfly, for example, look as if their edges had been dipped in black paint. He knows the flap-flap of a camouflage expert, the brown and white snout (Libytheana bachmanii), so called because it appears to have a long nose. Once it settles into a tree branch, this insect "disappears"; its snout becomes the stem and the brown and white wings, a dead leaf.

During their six-mile trek, Draeger's team has collected just a few specimens, primarily skippers, butterflies with such subtle differences in their markings they are difficult to identify, even with the field guide. At sunset the counters meet back at the Stage Stop Motel for dinner. Bailowitz tallies up the day's sightings. No records, but a dozen persons saw more than 4,000 specimens, representing more than 70 species.

There were even a few not seen for several years. Of the 4,000, no more than a dozen specimens were passed around the table. The empty collecting envelopes are representative of this new generation of butterfly enthusiasts. "The complexion of butterfly collecting has changed quite a bit in my lifetime," Draeger explains. "It used to be that collectors would go into an area and pick it clean. Now people are more conservation-minded."

Danforth, for example, has never pinned a specimen. An avid bird-watcher, he became interested in butterflies after Bailowitz invited him to help with a Xerces count eight years ago. He documents his sightings with photographs, no matter how long it takes to find a subject patient enough to pose for him. He keeps a garden planted especially to attract butterflies and provide fodder for caterpillars. "It opened a whole new world of things for me to watch," says Danforth.