The day had turned out hotter and the walk longer than I expected. My water bottle was almost empty, my face burned to a tomato red, when the butterflies rescued me.
On a summer day when for once I had no obligations, I set out to walk all the way around Waterfall Glen Forest Preserve, a 2,400-acre collection of prairie, woods and ravines that rings the Argonne National Laboratory south of Darien. It’s only a little over 9 miles around, no problem for Mr. Outdoor Adventure, but I lost track of the well-marked trail twice and had to backtrack about a mile each time. This was starting to feel more like a forced march than a summer lark.
Suddenly there were squirts of yellow floating before my eyes. Orange and black streaks tripped along the gully beside the trail. White shapes tumbled just beyond my fingertips. Splashes of black and blue skittered above the gravel path.
They were butterflies. Flitting up from the weeds, hanging in the air, hovering over nectary flowers.
There were some called mourning cloaks, their funereal black wings spread wide to show sober yellow and blue rims. Others were red admirals, wearing their military stripes in orange and white; common sulphurs in an uncommonly neon shade of yellow; and simple cabbage whites with nothing but a few brown spots to compete with the others’ stunning marks.
Here on the northeast corner of Waterfall Glen I’d stumbled onto a magical, and probably temporary, spot where anyplace I looked–at the ground, at the sky, into the weeds–I was sure to find a butterfly. They weren’t present in horror-movie numbers, but more of them were floating around than I’d ever seen in one spot.
To find that many butterflies hanging around together, you don’t have to hike all over Waterfall Glen (but if you go, take a bigger water bottle than I did). Butterflies are becoming increasingly visible in our immediate surroundings, thanks to the growing efforts to attract them in our museums, our gardens and our schools.
Since late May and running through Labor Day, a tent behind the Field Museum has been home to hundreds of butterflies from 38 species found in the Midwest. And next year, when the Nature Museum opens its new building in Lincoln Park, butterflies will be a featured attraction, with members of some 150 species flitting around in their own permanent exhibit, a 2,700-square-foot greenhouse.
Butterfly gardens, oases of nectar-bearing plants, are sprouting in back yards, school yards and public parks. On the morning of July 11, more than two dozen people showed up at the North Park Village Nature Center in the city for the sole purpose of counting the butterflies visible in its prairies and woods, part of a national butterfly census held every year around the 4th of July. And butterfly ranchers are marketing mass butterfly releases as a hip and fanciful alternative to throwing rice at weddings.
I had thought all those butterflies at Waterfall Glen were there to bask in the sun and the nectar plants. Maybe instead it was their newfound fame they were basking in.
Butterflies aren’t new to being adored, of course. Unlike wolves, bats and bees, all of which were long detested but are slowly getting image makeovers in a more eco-conscious era, butterflies have always been easy to love, even without a public relations campaign. They’re intriguing little creatures, perfectly capturing the age-old belief in the perfectibility of nature with their metamorphosis from wormy little crawly things to graceful winged bits of stained glass.
Butterflies have always seemed like a benign member of the sometimes intimidating animal world. “They don’t bite or scratch–they can’t, because they don’t have the body parts. No jaws, no claws,” says Margaret Thayer, a Field Museum scientist who studies insects, including butterflies. “Some of their caterpillars cause a lot of plant damage, but many people don’t make the connection that the caterpillars eating their plants grow up to be butterflies anyway, so the butterflies get off the hook.”
Even if butterflies have never given reasons to be demonized like wolves and bees, though, the explosion of interest in watching and exhibiting them derives from the same impulse that is rehabilitating some scary creatures. Simply put: It’s not cool to pin dead butterflies down in boxes anymore.
“As we’ve moved more toward watching butterflies with binoculars, observing their interactions with plants and each other, it’s gotten a lot of people interested who never would have wanted to go into the field and kill butterflies just to look at them in a box later,” says Doug Taron, who as curator of biology at the Nature Museum will oversee development of the butterfly habitat there.
Scientists and students still need those pinned collections, Taron and others note, so they can go on about the work of identifying and delineating the world’s butterfly population. (Lepidoptera, or butterflies and moths, is an order known to have at least 200,000 species, less than one-tenth of them butterflies.) But the idea that even butterfly hobbyists should pin their own collections has faded. There’s little interest anymore in having high school kids, for example, assemble collections of mounted butterflies for a science grade.
“We’re all seeing that butterflies are much more interesting to look at in flight,” says Taron, who says his own collection of mounted butterflies once numbered in the hundreds. “And when you watch them unfold their wings when emerging from a cocoon, or land on flowers and take nectar, they have such interesting and complex behaviors. None of that is captured at all by specimens that are pinned in boxes.”
The shift to watching from pinning has been entirely voluntary, notes Margaret Murley, a retired biologist in Evanston who heads the Chicago chapter of the Audubon Society.
“There’s no law against collecting butterflies,” she says, theorizing that because individual butterflies of most species don’t live more than a few weeks or months, enforcement would be difficult. Besides, Thayer adds, “the real threat to butterflies is not collecting some adult specimens but destroying their habitat so new generations of larvae have nothing to feed on.”
Watching butterflies, whether just for the vivid colors or for science, becomes an ecological act, because it inevitably leads to examination of the plants with which butterflies interact. One sunny morning, a monarch garbs your eye as it flits through your yard, but doesn’t stop until it hits that weedy patch in back of the neighbor’s garage. Why? Could it have anything to do with those milkweeds blooming among the puddles back there?
Wandering along the lakefront, you find yourself being escorted by a small, bright yellow pair of wings. You’ve heard that butterflies drink nectar, but all you see here is lawn and trees. What could a butterfly find to eat? How about that clover growing in the grass? Is there nectar in there somewhere?
“You don’t get very far with butterflies without learning something about plants, too,” says Murley, who organizes the North Park butterfly count. “It’s not hard to figure out that butterflies and caterpillars have their specific plants, so if you want to see butterflies you have to know where to find those plants.”
Monarchs need milkweed, a plant that thrives anywhere it finds wet soil in yards or nature. Baltimore checkerspots need turtlehead, a far less opportunistic wetland plant. Black swallowtails feast on Queen Anne’s lace, which is everywhere, and rattlesnake master, which isn’t. The regal fritillary, one of the rarest butterflies in Illinois, feeds on bird’s-foot violets, which grow on undisturbed prairies–only tiny fragments of which remain in Illinois.
The more you see the plant, the more you see its associated butterfly. For many people, it goes on from the butterfly-plant equation to wanting to protect or establish those plants in order to see more butterflies, either in a home butterfly garden or in a natural area such as a forest preserve.
That’s where biologists and nature-lovers start to become grateful that butterflies on wing are such attention-getters.
“When you do anything to help these creatures that are so nice to look at, you’re also making the space better for other insects, too–a lot of them little tiny things that nobody sees or cares much about,” Thayer says. “Butterflies are the ambassadors for the insect world.” Bugs with less glamor ride their Technicolor coattails.
Taron’s work isn’t only with butterflies. As a prairie restorationist, he also studies prairie spittle bugs, whose larvae look like little gobs of spit hanging on a grass called big bluestem. “It’s hard to generate the same level of enthusiasm for spittle bugs that you get for butterflies,” he says.
At press time, not a single Chicago museum had announced plans for an exhibit of bugs that look like spit.
“But if butterfly awareness leads to more prairie conservation, spittle bugs experience some of the benefits,” Taron notes.
It would be a case of the newcomers helping out the old-timers. Although insects, which now account for at least three-quarters of all animal species, first appeared more than 400 million years ago, the first butterflies and moths may not have appeared until 200 million to 250 million years later, reports the Illustrated Encyclopedia of the Butterfly World, by Paul Smart. They would have evolved alongside the flowering plants they pollinate and drink from.
How to tell a butterfly from a moth? It’s hard. Thayer explains that the most common distinction is that butterflies have clubs at the tips of their antennae, while moths have simple rods for antennae, sometimes covered with wool or fuzz. And butterflies tend to be active in the daytime, moths at night. “But in each group there’s a little vice versa going on, too,” she notes.
Their color–those resplendent markings that make an old box of pinned butterflies look like somebody’s souvenir psychedelia from the 1960s–comes from assorted combinations of pigment and scales. Pigment is chemical compounds that give other animals, including humans, color. A butterfly’s scales, which are roughly comparable to feathers on a bird, are often shaped to refract sunlight into specific colors, especially green or blue shades, Smart explains. One good reason not to catch a butterfly in your hand is that you risk destroying some of its scales, weakening its ability to do its natural thing.
Assorted members of the butterfly-moth extended family have evolved into some of the most astonishing members of the world’s fauna. In Madagascar there is a moth with a tongue 18 inches long used for dipping into the nectar of an especially long-throated orchid. Some Asian butterflies have become so adept at mimicking the look of a pair of dry leaves lying on the forest floor that their wings even have long, dark ribs running down the middle, and the lower tip of the wing has a stumpy stem. Many butterflies appear to have huge bird eyes printed on their wings, probably to ward off predators or entice them to bite the more expendable areas of the wing if they do bite. The larva of the European black hairstreak looks like a little lump of bird droppings.
Thayer notes that some butterflies don’t worry about resembling a big predator or an insignificant speck of excrement. Instead, they copy other butterflies. The viceroy, for example, is a wannabe monarch. The beloved monarch is well known for using its bold orange color to signal to predators that it tastes really bad. The slightly smaller viceroy, whose taste isn’t quite as bad, colors itself the same way–kind of the way a little boy might dress like the baddest teenager on the block.
For centuries, butterflies were thought of as little bits of freedom, flitting where they wanted. The Greeks believed a butterfly’s metamorphosis was an evocation of the human soul, a story we still tell ourselves. (Smart notes with curiosity that the great ancient document of human struggles, the Bible, never mentions butterflies. Odd considering the powerful parallel in the story of Jesus.) In “Bleak House,” Charles Dickens had Harold Skimpole plead, “I only ask to be free. The butterflies are free.”
It wasn’t until the dawn of the Victorian passion for tracking down and classifying all the world’s plant and animal species that butterflies attracted more than passing attention, Taron says. “Part of exploring was bringing back samples–that was how they appreciated the natural world,” he says.
But only as native landscapes began disappearing did butterflies begin to suffer. As their preferred plants diminished, Taron says, Illinois butterfly species took one of three routes. They went extinct, they adjusted their diets to survive on introduced plants that resembled their old hosts, or their numbers shrank enough to persist on the isolated remainders of their plants.
Most notorious of the extinctions or near-extinctions is the Karner blue, a butterfly that is still seen in some neighboring states but may be gone from Illinois, Taron says. Its caterpillars feed on the seed pods of wild–not garden variety–lupines, which grow in sandy-soiled oak savannas.
“In the absence of natural fires to slow oaks’ growth, the shade gets denser and the lupine plants stop blooming,” Taron says. “The plant is still there, but without the seedpod, from a butterfly’s standpoint that plant is gone.”
Some butterflies have fared much better since white settlers got to Illinois, if only because of accidents of natural history. The small, simple orange or yellow butterflies that show up everywhere are called sulphurs. If yellow, they’re clouded or common sulphurs; if orange, they’re also known as alfalfa butterflies. Before agriculture arrived, Taron speculates, the sulphurs might not have been in Illinois at all, or at least were uncommon. But when farmers brought alfalfa and clover to this region, the sulphurs followed.
The black swallowtail, he says, dined on native plants called rattlesnake master and golden Alexander for eons before agricultural plants like dill and weeds like Queen Anne’s lace arrived. Now, because both plants are plentiful, so are these delightful yellow-and-black fliers.
Then there are the butterflies that clung to shrinking territory for a century and are only now bouncing back. At Bluff Spring Fen near Elgin, Taron has for 16 years been part of a restoration movement that has cleared away many decades’ worth of debris. Since 1987, he has been monitoring the Bluff Spring Fen colonies of three wetland butterfly species, to determine the effects of restoration on their numbers. All three–the Baltimore checkerspot, the eyed brown and the black dash skipper–have larger populations now than before the project.
Somewhere, surely, a spittle bug is saying thank you.
BEST PLACES TO SEE NATIVE BUTTERFLIES
Doug Taron, the Nature Museum’s curator of biology, has identified five sites in the Chicago area where untrained observers are sure to find numerous butterflies. He says that late August is the peak viewing season for common butterfly species, such as monarchs, painted ladies and sulphurs, because members of all the season’s multiple broods may still be flying. For more unusual species, ideal viewing periods are noted.
1. Illinois Beach State Park, northeastern Lake County: “Early in the spring, if you go to where bearberry grows in the dunes, you can see this wonderful little brown butterfly called the hoary elfin flying in the hundreds,” Taron says.
2. Goose Lake Prairie State Park, Grundy County, about 50 miles southwest of Chicago: An especially good spot to find the silver-bordered fritillary, which is not endangered but is uncommon and thrives only in high-quality prairies, Taron says. Peak visibility is late June.
3. Waterfall Glen Forest Preserve, south of Darien: Its prairie and other natural areas host scores of butterflies. Taron’s favorite is the pipevine swallowtail, whose lower wings are an iridescent blue. Though very common in the southern United States, the species doesn’t show up here often because its host plant, pipevine, is usually not present. But there’s enough in Waterfall Glen to support a good colony.
4. Bluff Spring Fen, Elgin (an Illinois Nature Preserve): Watch in wetland areas for the three repopulating species–Baltimore checkerspot, eyed brown and European black dash skipper–and elsewhere for other butterflies.
5. Gensburg-Markham Prairie, Markham (an Illinois Nature Preserve): The seductive orange, black and brown wings of the aphrodite fritillary take center stage here from mid-June to late July. Nearly as big as a monarch, aphrodite has silvery metallic markings on the underside of its wings.
