The Death of a Butterfly or Central Oregon 2022 Part Deux

       Our first full day in Central Oregon was well begun.  We had our pictures of the previously refrigerated Pale Swallowtail and had watched him flap his wings and head into the tops of the ponderous pines.  It was a lovely day as we headed out of Black Butte Ranch.  This was a really nice change.  I mean, did I mention what June had been like in Portland?    Cold gray and wet.  Here we had a bright blue sky and a warm 80 degrees.  Darn near perfect for both people and butterflies.

Westerrn Meadow Fritillary

     Its just a few miles back west on the highway to the Camp Sherman turn off and a leisurely twenty minutes through the pines to the Metolius Preserve.  The Metolius River is famous among fly fishermen.  It arises from the forest in full flood and flows north to join with the Deschutes at Lake Billy Chinook.  The preserve is a tract of pine forest laced with streams that has been given a chance to repopulate with native plants.  The creeks eventually flow into the  nearby Metolius River.  The preserve is well known only, as far as I can tell, to the butterfly community.

    Unlike the wealthy fly fisherman, nobody ever got rich by catering to the butterfly watchers.

    As we had done a year before, we parked in the small lot, nabbed a map from the kiosk and headed out the Lake Trail.  Here there were pines, but also lots of other softer plants, the type a tiny caterpillar can sink his teeth into.  Soon we encountered several medium sized orange butterflies, a shade of subdued citrus.  We attempted to net a couple that wandered close, but without success.

Western Meadow Frit.  ventral view

   We had more success with the blues.  It seems that there are a large number of small blue butterflies that occur throughout the world.  In Hawaii we have one native species and a couple more that have been introduced.   Here in the northwest we have more than twenty species of blues, six of which occur in the Metolius preserve.  These tiny blue butterflies are a bit like South American flycatchers:  many species, difficult to tell apart and virtually unknown except to the cognoscenti.  If you want to get it right, though, you have to be able to tell them apart.  All the males are blue with dusky wing linings trimmed with a narrow band of white.  On the ventral surface, they are white or gray with a distinctive pattern of tiny black, gray or orange spots.  Most of the females are buffy on the back with a slightly more variable ventral pattern.  Fascinating, right?  But butterfly people seem to love their blues.

Jeffrey and the Skipper

    We observed a few Silvery Blues, which were kind enough to hold still and netted a Boisduval's Blue to take home in a plastic vegetable bag.  A short while later we netted a medium sized yellow butterfly.  Putting it in the wine glass we were able to identify it as an Orange Sulfur.  He wouldn't hold still in the glass for a photograph, so he, too, went in a bag. We walked through a meadow that had been very productive the year before, netting and bagging what turned out to be the most common skipper.   

    Finally, just after we crossed a bridge that leads you over a forest stream, I got lucky and netted one of those medium sized orange butterflies.  What went un-netted was a larger butterfly that sported orange white and black.  We saw several and a couple times one came close, but neither Sandra nor I  (we are a two net family) were able to capture one. 

    We returned to the preserve once more during the trip, this time in the afternoon.  Surprisingly there was even less action and we were never able to net that larger butterfly.

Melissa's Blue thanks to Pyle and LaBar

     Soon we were back at the ranch where we stashed our butterflies in the refrigerator.   My son came in to get a beverage and was amused to find four bags of butterflies behind his bottled water.  
 

     Late in the afternoon Sandra and I went up to the golf course, which was about half a mile from our house.  There we brandished our putters and honed our skills on the practice green.  This is a delightful diversion and over half an hour or so I sank a couple twenty footers. Of course I missed countless other shots.  As I was stepping up to my ball, late in our round, I saw a small butterfly perched on top.  I bent down and discovered that it was  Melissa's Blue in resting position.  I'm including a picture here from Butterflies of the Pacific Northwest by Pyle and LeBar, the bible we are using and one that you should purchase if you want to be a PNW lepidopterist.  As blues go, this one is a bit more distinctive, bearing black and orange spots. Having made such a big deal about native plants, it was interesting to note in Pyle's species description that Meleissa's blue  may occur in "disturbed habitats such as roadsides and ditches."  to which we can add practice greens.

Orange Sulfur Butterfly  Colias eurytheme

    The following morning we put our photographic skills to the test.  First on the docket was the Silver Spotted Skipper.  He was quite passive in his chilled state and we got a fine photo of this mundane species.  We also got a picture of him resting peacefully in the hand of my bemused grandson.  

    Next came the medium sized orange butterfly.  As you can see (or perhaps you have to take our word for it) this is a Western Meadow Fritillary.  Like the Pale Swallowtail, he started in resting position.  This was a good thing.  Although the black pattern on the orange wings is handsome it is not nearly as distinctive as the four butterscotch ovals on the ventral hind wing.  He took about five minutes to warm up and then flew into the trees.  

    Sandra then retrieved the other two butterflies, the Orange Sulfur and the Boiduval's Blue.  Both were still fluttering in their bags.  Well, that wasn't right, so we put them in the freezer for five minutes.  When they came out, the Orange Sulfur was still alive.  In the words of Miracle Max who cures Westley, in the Princess Bride, "Almost dead is a little bit alive."  For some of us in anesthesia, these were words to live by.  He stretched, arched his back, posed for one good picture and then he was no more.  

Miracle Max...Almost dead is a little bit alive

    Alas, Poor Sulfur.  I knew him Horatio.  A butterfly of infinite jest, if a bit sensitive to the cold.

    The Boisduval's Blue was a different story all together.  He was flat out dead, a clean kill.  His colors had faded and he was buried at sea with military honors.  

     But wait! While we were out collecting buterflies, my son had found a wonderful rusty
coloured moth.  A small bit of refrigeration rendered him alive but tractable and we got this fine picture. 

    Just today we contacted Daniel Rubinoff, who kindly identified it as a female Wandering Tiger Moth. Spilosoma vagans.  Dan went on to say, " the females are diurnal and the males come to light."  It is categorized as  Boisduval  1892.  

Wandering Tiger Moth. Spilosoma vagans. 

  Jean Baptiste Boisduval, whose name is attached to so many butterflies, was born in Normandy in 1799, a time when it was safer not to be in Paris.  I am unable to find anything on his education, but the great intellectuals of that time were often taught locally and rose in their field as a result of their intelligence and diligence.  Boisduval became the premier botanist of France and then became interested in beetles and butterflies. By 1815 he held a prestigious museum job in Paris where he lived until his retirement. He died in 1789, three years before the tiger moth received its formal classification.   Apparently he never left France and worked with specimens he received from talented collectors.  He inherited the collections of La Perouse, whose ship, the Astrolabe, disappeared mysteriously after stopping in Botany Bay in 1788 where he presumably dropped off his insect collection.  It is said that Louis  the XVI asked after the expedition right up to the time he was led to the guillotine.  Boisduval also  received the insects from Duperrey who circumnavigated in 1822-25 on La Coquille.

      Another collector for this world expert in butterflies was Pierre Lorquin.  Although it seems Boisduval got the final credit, it would appear that Lorquin, who was born on the Alsatian border in 1797, got to have most of the fun.  He collected for Boisduval in Andalusia and Algeria 18

Papilio lorquinianus, the Sea Green Swallowtail

47-48, in California and Oregon 1849-58,  China and the Philippines 1859-60, and what we now call Indonesia and Maylaysia from 1860 to 1865.  He returned to collect in Colombia and  California from1866 to 69.  A comprehensive biography of Pierre Lorquin is beyond my ability to locate, but what little we know is tantalizing.  For those of us who have had the privilege to look for animals in difficult locations, Pierre Lorquin stands as a paragon.  The Indiana Jones of Invertebrate zoology minus the Hollywood crap.

    He is commemorated by two butterflies, Lorquin's Admiral, the pride of the PNW and Papilio lorquinianus, the Sea Green Swallowtail of Indonesia

    I hope all this takes your mind off that dead blue and that you are looking forward to the next installment.

Jeff

    

Butterflies in Central Oregon Part One

     Sandra and I just spent five days in Central Oregon.  For the first four, we hosted my son and grand son in a house at Black Butte Ranch.  Black Butte is eight miles form Sisters.  Once a little cow town with a world class view of snow capped peaks, Sisters is now a discouraging sprawl of houses and condos crammed in cheek to jowl, tacky shops and over priced restaurants.  Bummer, dude.

     In the other direction, Black Butte is a thirty minute drive from one of the premier butterfly spots in the northern part of the state.

Grampa teaches Jeffery fly fishing in the prettiest place on earth

     Black Butte Ranch is actually a large, resort, (which prior to 1980 might have been a ranch) with swimming pools, tennis courts, the best bike paths on the planet and a lake for fly fishing which sports that view of the Three Sisters to which I alluded earlier.  A house rental at the ranch isn't cheap, but astonishingly, it is little more than renting a room at an "inexpensive" motel in Sisters.  Heaven help us.

    We timed our stay to correspond with spring butterfly season.   We came three weeks later last year; in early July 2021 the smoke from forest fires was so thick you could not see the mountains.  But the butterflies were good then and we hoped they would be even better this year.

Silver Spot Skipper on Azalea, Samsung phone.  June 2022

    On our first afternoon we went down near the horse corral at the ranch.  The trail ride out of the corral leads by a swampy creek, so here we had a moist environment and stinky horse poop, both of which butterflies should love.  It took me only a few minutes to net a Pale Swallowtail.  This handsome butterfly turned out to be common in Central Oregon.   We did not see it last year and as our time progressed we found surprisingly little overlap with what we saw last year and what we found in 2022.

    This year we have engaged in a friendly rivalry on the internet.  Enthusiasts take pictures of their findings and post them on a facebook page, Butterflies and Moths of the Pacific Northwest.  As the host of the page lives in Ashland, she includes Northern California in the region, so we struggle to keep up.  In the process we have learned a couple tricks about butterfly photography.  

Pale Swallowtail in resting position fresh out of the refrigerator.

   This year we are using nets (as opposed to sneaking up on the butterflies and trying for an al fresco picture.)  If you aren't using a net you probably aren't making the best possible identifications.  Sandra is way better at handling the butterflies, so she is frequently the one to transfer them to a reasonably priced receptacle.  Four weeks ago we were attempting to photograph the butterflies in a bottle, which rapidly evolved into a stemless wine glass.  

    This still wasn't getting us the best results, so we asked our mentor, Daniel Rubinoff, PhD, what we should do to take better pictures.  Dan said that he hates taking pictures, but if we wanted to get the best results, we should take a cooler into the field, or take the butterflies home and pop them in the fridge.  On our next outing, we captured the most common skipper in the area and brought him home.  The next morning (remember this is Portland and it has been a cold, wet spring) we took him out and put him on an azalea in front of our condo.  He stayed put for over an hour and we were able to try out three different cameras under these ideal conditions. Sandra's Samsung cell phone was the winner and so most of our photos are taken with her camera / phone.   

Pale Swallowtail Papilio eurymedon, Black Butte Ranch June 2022

   And so...we brought the Pale Swallowtail back to Glaze Meadow 112 and put him in the refrigerator.  The next morning it was light enough for photography by about 8:30.  We brought the butterfly out and placed him on a leaf.  we are not botanists and leave it up to you to identify the plant.  He perched quietly in resting position.  After about five minutes he spread his wings and slowly rotated his body so that his wings were receiving the maximum amount of sun.  It is well known that butterflies use their wings to as solar collectors but it was fascinating to watch.  

    A minute or so later the most amazing thing happened.  He began shivering his wings.  Very few butterflies are able to shiver, which warms the muscles.  This went on for about five minutes. We both took movies of the shivering but neither of our movies will load onto the blog.   Here is a youtube video that shows this phenomenon.  It is nowhere near as nice as ours, but gives you an idea.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eNHB-sYdc8 

    It is interesting that this was by far the most common large butterfly we saw in Central Oregon last week, June 22 to 26.    Only three weeks later in 2021 we did not see a single individual.  By the first week of July the Pale Swallowtail had finished its spring cycle and was no longer flying.

    We saw lots more butterflies and two more blogs should follow this one.  Sandra and I hope your summer vacation is as nice as ours and that you see lots of interesting critters.

jeff