One of my ulterior motives in all this bird stuff is to eventually get you to care about insects as well. Let’s face it, insects suffer from a likeability deficit akin to that of most politicians, what with the biting and the disease transmission and the landing on your food right when you’re about to eat it and all. But I think we can all get behind butterflies, those harmless, even beneficial, and undeniably beautiful ambassadors for the insect world.
I have fancied myself a butterfly fancier since my early 20s. Back then I was working seasonal bird research jobs around the country, including butterfly-rich places like the Texas hill country and Southeast Arizona. I started trying to identify anything I could find a field guide for, like wildflowers and reptiles and amphibians, and fell hard into butterflies as well. And so each summer, at the slack tide of bird migration, I turn to bugs.
I love that you can’t know butterflies well without also knowing plants. Animal and vegetable intimately linked, some plants for nectar and others for caterpillar food. Most everyone knows Monarchs whose caterpillars eat only various milkweeds – my kids and I watched a female lay eggs on a common milkweed outside the kitchen window last week - but adults will drink from many flowers, from milkweeds to goldenrods to especially the problematic Asian garden shrub known as the butterfly bush. As I scan a landscape in summer, I’m cataloging, in a barely conscious way, possible nectar sources and hostplants for butterflies. Is this spot worth a stop some other day? Is that Sweet Pepperbush blooming yet? Has the buttonbush gone past?
Over the last few weeks I led a couple of annual butterfly counts along the lines of those Christmas Bird Counts I’m always talking about in December. People go out on a scheduled day to count butterflies in key habitats within a 15-mile circle. Just a handful of us venture out on these counts, one in Truro and another from Brewster to Wellfleet, fewer souls than a bird count typically attracts. Others don’t know what they’re missing.
At one stop a slog through a mosquito-ey swamp rewards us with a population of rare and local Appalachian Browns flitting through dappled light among Red Maples, and with bountiful and ripe highbush blueberries. Elsewhere we count bouncy Wood-Nymphs at dry grassy edges or hostplant specialist Bog Coppers in a wild cranberry bog.
We thrill at the sight of a trim, stately little hairstreak marching around on a leaf or drinking contentedly from a milkweed flower – is it our first Edward’s Hairstreak of the day? Or something even more rare? Last week I discovered a handsome White M Hairstreak in my own yard, just the third I’ve seen on the Cape, a species whose dorsal wings flash iridescent blue in flight. In my photos I accidentally documented this female laying eggs on a hostplant not mentioned in the literature. In butterflies there are still discoveries to be made in backyards.
In 1948, the famous author and low-key professional lepidopterist Vladimir Nabokov wrote a piece for the New Yorker about his lifelong passion for butterflies. It’s so perfect, so gorgeously poetic that when I read it I become emotional, and overcome with imposter syndrome such that I temporarily vow to never write about nature again. Towards the end he says “And the highest enjoyment of timelessness—in a landscape selected at random—is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which I cannot explain.”
Maybe butterflies will never be your ecstasy, but hopefully something in the natural world can be – perhaps it’s orchids, or whales, or gamefish, or obscure beetles. Maybe you haven’t figured it out yet. But take it from ol’ Vladimir, if not from me - a natural obsession enriches a life.
