From Birds to Butterflies

7:18 a.m., June 8, in a wet prairie southeast of Ortonville
As a zoologist for the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources’ Biological Survey, I’m surveying birds today. Halfway through my grassland bird point count, I notice a flurry of small, fiery wings just above the tops of the grasses. Whereas most of the bird activity I’m seeing this morning is taking place 50 to 100 yards away from me, this new movement, made by a female northern crescent (Phyciodes cocyta), is happening within five feet, too close for focusing my binoculars. I grab my camera and snap a few photos of this vibrant black-and-orange butterfly as it perches in front of me, wings held completely open. Redirecting my gaze farther out into the grasses in search of birds, I see a few more specks of orange alighting on the vegetation. It’s comforting to see the crescents in abundance today, as their presence here seems to vary with how wet the prairie is; this year must be just right for them.

My friends, family, and colleagues know me as a bird person. Having spent most of my life seeking birds both as a hobby and as part of my career, there’s no doubt I’ve earned this identity. For the past 14 years, I’ve spent most weekdays each June getting up before dawn to conduct bird surveys like this one throughout Minnesota, becoming intimately familiar with our state’s breeding avifauna and their habitats. But other than monarchs, which I studied in junior high and high school, I tended to ignore butterflies, especially the smaller ones like skippers, which I thought I’d never be able to identify, despite having a couple of butterfly and moth field guides tucked into my expansive bird book collection. 

By the end of June, however, as the birds are quieting down and tending to their newly hatched young, the invertebrate world is kicking into high gear, and among them the butterflies are arguably the most visually inspiring. After ten years of surveying birds, it became increasingly difficult to ignore this world that was unfolding literally right in front of me. Rather than lamenting the end of June—and my field season—I began to eagerly await the coming bounty of form and color offered by the butterflies.

10:31 a.m., July 3, at the edge of a tamarack bog near East Bethel
I’ve been to this location several times before when looking and listening for birds, including Nashville warblers and northern waterthrushes. Today, though, I’m here to find and photograph butterflies, and it’s hot, pushing 95 degrees. Too late in the day for much birdsong, this is however the right time and place to seek my anticipated targets. Early July tends to be the time for seeing peak butterfly diversity in Minnesota, and the tops of surrounding swamp milkweeds are clustered with nectaring dion skippers (Euphyes dion) and their fellow skippers known as mulberry wings (Poanes massasoit), both sedge specialists. An occasional silver-bordered fritillary (Boloria selene) and Acadian hairstreak (Satyrium acadica) stand out from the swarms of skippers.

Minnesota has somewhere around 160 butterfly species that have occurred here naturally, meaning they didn’t get here by hitching a ride in a delivery truck or by being laid as an egg attached to an ornamental plant grown in the southern United States. These species comprise five families: Hesperiidae (skippers), Papilionidae (swallowtails), Pieridae (whites and yellows), Lycaenidae (coppers, blues, and hairstreaks), and Nymphalidae (brushfoots), which is our largest family and includes our most familiar butterfly, the monarch. Some species are easy to tell apart from others, whereas some are more cryptic, and a few may not be identifiable without close inspection under a microscope. Most, thankfully, are rather photogenic for a patient observer.

On this particular day, I’m photographing close to 20 species of butterflies, all within a relatively small geographic area, and all five of Minnesota’s butterfly families are present. The grassy strip between the road and the bog is littered with blooming clovers, trefoils, and vetches, and while these flowers are invasive species, their blooms are butterfly magnets in this particular location. Most butterflies in Minnesota have special relationships with flowers and plants, either as a source of nectar for adults or as food for caterpillars. Like the sedge skippers, some butterflies are closely tied to a particular habitat where their larval host plants are found, and as a result are locally abundant to rare statewide. Other butterflies use many host plants, and still others have just a few that are common and widespread; the result is that these butterflies tend to be more easily found and observed.

In addition to the abundant sedge skippers, I’m seeing eastern tailed-blues (Cupido comyntas), orange sulphurs (Colias eurytheme), silvery checkerspots (Chlosyne nycteis), and eastern tiger swallowtails (Papilio glaucus) joining in the nectar banquet. In a few damp spots on the road, white admirals (Limenitis arthemis arthemis) are sipping what available moisture is to be had, as their close cousin and monarch-mimic, the viceroy (Limenitis archippus), floats on by. Just a few feet from the road into the sedges, I spot a striking Baltimore checkerspot (Euphydryas phaeton) sporting the same black-and-orange color scheme of the oriole that shares its moniker.

Like the warblers that pass through southern Minnesota each spring, the synchronicity of these butterflies’ presence here is similarly fleeting; my luck in catching them on the wing at this particular moment in time is a privilege.

1:19 p.m., April 17, on a dirt road in Beltrami Island State Forest
Most butterflies live for only months at most, and they might be observable as adults for as little as a couple of weeks; the rest of their life cycles are spent as eggs, larvae (caterpillars), or pupae (chrysalids).

Some species, however, overwinter as adults, entering hibernation in the fall under logs or in sheltered areas and emerging the following spring. I’m looking at three of these species right now, sunning in the middle of the road as the temperature hovers just under 60 degrees. The first is a mourning cloak (Nymphalis antiopa), our first butterfly to be seen flying each year in Minnesota. Its open wings reveal a glossy violet-blue interior outlined in a thick edge of creamy pearl—quite a sight to behold on a balmy day in the north woods, when plenty of snow has yet to melt in the forest interior. As a cloud passes over, the butterfly closes its wings to conserve warmth, revealing a gray-brown underside well camouflaged for its surroundings.

Nearby, the other two species—eastern comma (Polygonia comma) and green comma (Polygonia faunus)—do the same, their blaze orange uppersides contrasting with mottled brown underwings. Whereas the eastern comma is found throughout Minnesota, the green is at home in lowland coniferous woodlands in the northern third of the state. Both species have a comma-shaped white mark on their hindwings for which they and their close relatives are named.

Whereas birds are present year-round, in Minnesota our butterflies are active mostly from April through October, meaning for six months out of the year your butterflies will have to appear in your dreams (or you’ll need to travel elsewhere to see them). But much like the first returning flocks of Canada geese in early spring, or the first pairs of horned larks alighting on a rural roadside in late winter, I look to the first butterflies of the year as harbingers of the abundance of life to come.

10:09 a.m., June 27, in an extensive grassland complex in northwestern Minnesota
Not long into my walking transect, I spy my target for the next six days of monitoring: a Dakota skipper (Hesperia dacotae), one of Minnesota’s imperiled butterflies, atop its preferred nectar source here, narrow-leaved purple coneflower. In the distance I hear a marbled godwit pair calling incessantly, probably upset about a cow wandering too close to its recently hatched young. A little closer, but still a ways out, I hear bubbly male bobolinks emitting their characteristic robot-like songs. Maybe 50 yards from me, I can make out a grasshopper sparrow perched at the top of a grassy bunch, occasionally throwing its head back as it blurts out the insect-like trill for which it is named. And just three feet away is this tiny pale orange skipper with the faintest of hindwing spot bands, sitting silently on the coneflower head, with only me as its witness as I stand vigil in the middle of the prairie.

This is, perhaps, one of the main reasons why I feel a sense of urgency in seeking butterflies; I am one of just a handful of people who are witnessing them, and there are increasingly fewer left to witness. Once found throughout the prairies of western Minnesota, the Dakota skipper has lost over 98 percent of its range in the state over the past several decades, and the only known remaining population here is the one residing in the prairie I’m standing in. While we know this species has exhibited a precipitous decline in the state, we don’t fully understand the reasons for that decline. It’s too late for some other butterflies—including the Ottoe skipper, the Assiniboia skipper, and the arogos skipper, all former residents of Minnesota’s prairies—but perhaps time remains to understand why some of our species continue to disappear. The first step in doing so is of course knowing where they still can be found, and that is motivation enough for me to want to keep looking. This skipper in front of me is proof enough that I’m on the right path.

So maybe it’s as simple as that. More so than even the birds I’ve spent most of my life observing, butterflies represent to me both the interconnectedness and fragility of the natural world. Their life cycles, their varied life histories, their unique relationships with their host plants, and the places in which they thrive create a charisma that certainly matches that of the avian world if not surpasses it. In addition, birdwatchers vastly outnumber those who actively seek butterflies, so the thrill of exploration and contributing to an expanding knowledge base beckons me to go a little further.

My own journey chasing butterflies has led me to just as many interesting Minnesota locales as have the birds, and now, having photographed over 100 species in the state, I’m planning new excursions to put me in the right place and at the right time to bear witness to the next one.