Chasing Butterflies

Call it a butterfly reunion.  A few weeks ago, just like every July, I chased butterflies with my friend Jay Kaplan, a keen eyed naturalist and director of Canton, Connecticut’s Roaring Brook Nature Center.   Armed with nets, field guides, and unbridled enthusiasm, we joined several others in visiting our regular circuit of meadows, woods, farm pastures and hay lots, streamsides, power line rights-of-way, and fields as part of the North American Butterfly Association’s (NABA) annual butterfly count.  It’s a mix of childlike joy and scientific pursuit.

As usual, we started at Nod Brook Wildlife Management Area in nearby Simsbury, not because we’re certain butterflies will be present at any particular time, but for the same reason butterflies go there—for the flowers.  Searching for butterflies is actually a quest for the right vegetation.  Butterflies are attracted to certain blooms or even the sap of trees upon which they feed.  Sun, warmth, and blossoms are a sure recipe for locating them.  Although we got there a bit too early to find many of the colorful insects flying in the cool air and heavy dew, the broad grassy meadows, ponds, and weedy wetlands grow an abundant buffet of milkweed, red and white clover, buttonbush, sneezeweed and other nectar producing delicacies that almost always reveal a surprise.  We found a few pearl crescents and cabbage whites among others, but on our way out Jay braked the car hard when we spied a red admiral enjoying some moisture on the damp dirt road.  It’s a dark winged creature with red bands and white spots.

Although most individuals are identified in flight, I feel delightfully silly with my long handled white mesh net occasionally swatting at the air chasing a tiny aerial acrobat I can’t recognize on the wing.  How wonderful to be like a child again, running through a meadow of waist high grasses and flowers, feeling them caress and scratch my legs as clothing and shoes collect a bounty of seeds, burrs, and pieces of stem, leaves and flower petals.  My feet find themselves surprisingly unsteady on the uneven ground, sometimes spongy and wet, at other times lumpy with tussocks I cannot see.

There’s magic in these bright winged beauties as they flutter, glide and float in colors whose artistry is far beyond that of any churchy stained glass.  Even their names are the stuff of fairytales—great spangled fritillary, mourning cloak, little wood satyr, northern pearly eye, hoary edge, common sootywing.  I’m intoxicated by their flight, grace, delicacy, improbable lightness.  A person chasing butterflies never grows old.

Brown winged common wood nymphs with their eye-like spots were abundant in a municipally owned field along Old Farms Road in Simsbury.  Pale yellow clouded sulphurs were busy feeding on purple loosetrife along the edge of Canton’s Meadow Road.  We found a lone American lady on the ground just outside the barn at Hickory Ledges Farm.  As it flexed its wings we watched it go from orange and black when open to gray and pink when closed.  Perry Farm’s pasture was filled with small silver bordered fritillaries whose orange wings were busy with black lines, spots and chevrons.  Here we saw our only tiger swallowtail, a large yellow butterfly with distinctive black stripes and narrow projections or “tails” on its hind wings.

Despite our return to the same haunts each year, we never know what we’ll find.  So much depends on the weather, when broods hatch, and sheer accident.  This year was a record for silver-bordered fritillary, Baltimore checkerspot, and mulberry wing.  Sadly, for the first time we didn’t see a single monarch with its striking orange wings patterned with black bands and white spots.  Perhaps the most famous of our butterflies for it’s large size, stunning pattern and remarkable 3,000 mile migration, it’s been in steep decline for years due to loss of winter habitat in Mexico and disappearance of milkweed flowers in fields lost to development and subject to new agricultural practices.

Romping through meadows in the summer sun may be playful, but it’s also serious citizen science.  Our annual foray has contributed to what NABA describes as “the largest database of butterfly occurrences and abundances in the world . . .  increasingly used by scientists to study butterfly population trends and to answer questions about butterfly biology.”  Seeing fewer monarchs over the past few years is among our contributions to this store of knowledge, and this year’s zero was not a surprise however disappointing.

Chasing butterflies close to home enables me to know the place I live more keenly and completely.  At the same time, I feel my finger on the pulse of the planet as a whole.  I discover and rediscover nearby places increasingly deeply, getting to know them more profoundly than could possibly be revealed on a mere walk or drive-by.  Following butterflies is no idle pastime.  I let them take me places most people fail to tread.