The butterfly species you raised in your grade school classroom and fed milkweed was a monarch butterfly.
“People love monarchs,” Vancouver native Jeff Hill said.
That’s because, in addition to being handy classroom critters, they are huge (wingspan of 3-5 inches) and distinctively beautiful (intense orange with black veins, black wing margins with white spots).
Even so, Hill said, most casual butterfly observers don’t realize that monarchs are rarely ever seen in Clark County. If you think you’ve seen a monarch here, it’s more likely a Western tiger swallowtail. Usually, you have to travel pretty far south (past Eugene, Ore.,) or east (past The Dalles, Ore.,) to find monarchs, he said.
That’s no problem for Hill, who has adopted butterfly science and art as his retirement pastime. The retired anesthesiologist recently installed an expanded version of his previous papier-mâché butterfly exhibit, which was shown at the downtown Vancouver library a few years ago, in the big display case at the entrance to the Cascade Park library branch. It will stay up through the end of this month.
The 60 different papier-mâché butterflies on display represent 40 different species, Hill said. A few models show off the entire life cycle of one particular local species — the Western tiger swallowtail — from egg to tiny caterpillar to chrysalis to fully formed butterfly. Each model took Hill several hours to create and paint, he said.
As he strove for scientific accuracy, Hill looked to “Butterflies of the Pacific Northwest,” a field guide by lepidopterists Dr. Robert Michael Pyle, a noted naturalist and author who lives in Grays River, and Caitlin LaBar, a photographer and lifelong butterfly student who lives in Kelso and maintains a blog called Northwest Butterflies.
Original
Picture an old fellow tromping around the woods armed with binoculars, cameras and six different butterfly nets, Pyle said, and you’ve got him pegged.
“I’ve been chasing butterflies for 66 years,” said Pyle, 77. “I’ve done it hundreds of times. It’s always exciting. It’s always a treasure hunt.”
His master’s degree thesis for the University of Washington College of Forestry became “Watching Washington Butterflies,” the first book on the subject, published in 1974.
Many more books have followed. Butterflies may seem small and simple, but butterfly science can be bewilderingly complex. Members of the same species can look dramatically different from one another depending on sex, life-cycle stage and local habitat, while members of different species can appear just about identical. Mastering those details can be a lifelong pursuit, as it has been for Pyle.
Butterflies are not “printed like stamps,” according to “Butterflies of the Pacific Northwest.” “Each one is an original.”
Decline and restoration
Pyle said changing climate, loss of habitat to human development, and farm and yard chemicals can push butterflies from place to place — or simply destroy whole populations.
“Butterflies are indicators of the health of ecosystems,” he said. “They are very vulnerable to human impacts. A certain number are listed as endangered and the majority of them are probably declining.”
But there’s plenty of reason to hope, he added. Pyle said when he was studying in England a leading local scientist was speaking out about the pending extinction of a butterfly called the large blue. That inspired him to launch what’s become the world’s largest agency working on behalf of butterflies, bees and other pollinators: the Xerxes Society. It’s based in Portland with a staff of 100 spread all around the world, Pyle said.
The large blue did disappear from England, but a new generation of butterfly activists restored its habitat and successfully reintroduced its closest European relative, Pyle said. A similar restoration of silvery blue butterfly is now underway in Presidio Park in San Francisco, he said.
Here are Pyle’s three prescriptions for a butterfly-filled future.
“Don’t use pesticides,” he said. “Stop using poison. Let’s make it a cleaner, healthier world.”
You may have to work harder in your garden, he said, but the end result is worth it.
- Plant butterfly foods and pollinator-friendly gardens.
“You plant it and they will come,” Pyle said.
Check out the Xerxes Society’s lists of region-specific pollinator plants at xerces.org/pollinator-conservation/pollinator-friendly-plant-lists.
- Pick up a butterfly net (for catching and releasing, not collecting). Proudly demonstrate your butterfly nerdiness to the world, which needs more of that, Pyle said.
“Keep those nets in the hands of kids. I mean that literally,” he said. “Without generations of kids catching bugs in jars and butterflies in nets, who’s going to grow up to become the wildlife biologists of the future?”
