Spring in the Columbia River Gorge

Yesterday I visited a few of my favorite spots in the Columbia Gorge to see what was flying and dust off my Nikon camera a bit. Images are from Klickitat Canyon (all the "browns") and Grassy Knoll trail head (greenies).

Propertius Duskywing male, Erynnis propertius

Pacuvius Duskywing male, Erynnis pacuvius

Pacuvius Duskywing male, Erynnis pacuvius, nectaring on chokecherry

Pacuvius Duskywing male, Erynnis pacuvius, nectaring on chokecherry

Brown Elfin, Callophrys augustinus, nectaring on chokecherry

Sheridan's Green Elfin/Hairstreak, Callophrys sheridanii, probable male

Sheridan's Green Elfin/Hairstreak, Callophrys sheridanii, probable male

Sheridan's Green Elfin/Hairstreak, Callophrys sheridanii, probable female

Sheridan's Green Elfin/Hairstreak, Callophrys sheridanii, probable female (same one as above)

Recording observations and reporting data

Waaay back in 2016, I wrote an article explaining a few methods for recording butterfly observations: Recording Geospatial Data
Reminder: you can use the search bar on the left of my blog to search for butterflies or questions you might have and it will bring up any of my posts matching that topic.

As the 2019 butterfly season is starting up, I wanted to revisit the ways you can record and submit your observations.

Reporting...what, when, why, where, how?
What: any butterflies you see! We might not care about every single day you see a Cabbage White (an introduced and ubiquitous species) in your backyard, but it can be helpful to know the overall distribution and flight period. Perhaps one year you mark every day you see a Cabbage White in your yard, then in subsequent years you only track the day you see the first Cabbage White of the year in your yard, and maybe a few days towards the end of the season.

When: please don't overwhelm a record-keeper with daily emails of your observations. We will gladly take all the data, but if you are a prolific observer, save up your data and send in batches, either a couple times over the summer or once at the end of the year. If you are an occasional observer and/or have questions about an identification, go ahead and send an email at the time. If I can answer a question around the time you saw a butterfly, it might help you make better observations at the time rather than waiting for the following season.

Why: the data is used for research. Information on seasonal flight patterns gives insight into how butterflies respond to seasonal weather patterns or habitat changes. Location data can reveal patterns of habitat use, helping us identify overall species ranges, subspecies ranges, or population segregates, adding to our knowledge of the species.

Where: everywhere! Your backyard garden, a green strip in the city, coastal forests to mountain tops. The vast majority of butterfly records are near roads, which is to be expected and is still important, but if you are an avid hiker, especially if you are a backpacker getting into remote parts of the state, any records you can provide are very important to filling in the gaps in our data.

How: photographs, specimens, written or digital notes, emailed or mailed to a record-keeper. Details below...

Snipped view of butterfly records mapped on a large-scale map.

Recording data
I still highly recommend using the Avenza app as a way to quickly record locations that can easily be exported and emailed to a record-keeper. You can review my description of the app and some of my suggestions about the maps to use in the 2016 article linked above. They continue to add new maps for purchase in the store and improve the app. You can still purchase Benchmark state atlas overview maps (the two-page spread of the whole state you would see in the front of a printed Benchmark Atlas), but they are now starting to make the entire atlases available, a seamless mosaic of all the pages in a state atlas! I've purchased the California Benchmark Atlas in this format for $25 as I will be visiting the state later this summer. It looks nice and should be useful for helping me follow mountain roads and knowing where I'm at. I also recently discovered that you can plot photos from your phone into an Avenza map; it will create a pin at the location the photo was taken, and if you open the pin attributes you will see the photo. These can then be exported and viewed in Google Earth or emailed to other people. For more details on how to use Avenza, see my 2016 article or email me to request a copy of a help document I wrote (only slightly more detailed than the article).

Smart phones (at least iPhones) come with a default app called Compass. Most people ignore this, but did you know that besides the compass it also gives you your latitude and longitude location? I didn't! This was recommended to me by a colleague. If you are more of a paper-and-pen records keeper, you might prefer to use this over Avenza, as you simply open the app and write down your lat/long location for any observations you are making. Another option is to simply take a screenshot of the app whenever you take some pictures of a butterfly, as a quick and easy way to track the location of your sightings (on an iPhone, press the power button and the round menu button at the same time to take a screenshot of your phone). Just make sure you remember if you took the screenshot before or after the photos it's supposed to go with!

Submitting records

A few northwest lepidopterists work on projects to compile butterfly and moth records across Washington and Oregon and adjacent areas (depending on the project).

If you are interested in moths and assisting with data collection, please visit the PNW Moths website. They have excellent photographic plates of macro moths (larger moths, excludes the tiny "micro moths") that can help you identify what you are seeing, in addition to other photos on the detailed species pages. There is a "contact us" link for emailing the web administrator.

If you are interested in Washington butterflies, please submit records to me! I am helping with a project to compile all records in the state. We are working on a database of the records that will be used for research. For example, it is known that the Coronis Fritillary migrates up and down in elevation over the summer, but all the data has never been mapped, so having a complete set of records over history will help answer questions and provide a visual look at what is happening. The database will not be distributed publicly and data for sensitive species will be treated carefully. If you have other concerns for privacy or how the data will be used, please ask. If you wish to contribute to our work, please send the following information to me (contact email on the left of my blog page)...

1. Your name (& any other observers you wish to give credit to for the record)
2. Location data (Lat/Long coordinates or a very detailed description, or both)
• Latitude and longitude coordinates are highly preferred, we can generate the elevation and a text description of the location ourselves as long as we have the lat/long coordinates.
• PLS (Township, Range, Section) is acceptable if a detailed description is included, such as "forest road 3800, just past sharp switchback in the south half of section 10, T10N R20E", this way we can generate Lat/Long coordinates based on your description.
• Other data may be included but is not required: elevation, weather conditions, etc.
3. Date (day, month, year)
4. Photograph(s) or detailed description
• A photograph may not be accepted if it is a difficult to identify species that cannot be confirmed without a collected specimen. In such a case, the record may be included in the database but will have a note that it is "questionable/not confirmed" or something similar.
• Think about the species or species-group you are photographing and try to capture important features. If it is a blue or a fritillary, most species will require a ventral (underside) shot for positive identification. If you can't get that angle, or only a little peek at it, go ahead and send the photos anyway, we may still be able to make a positive ID based on the clarity of the images and/or habitat, date (some species only fly early or late in the season), etc.
• Pictures of other species flying at the same location can tell us what an otherwise unidentifiable butterfly is in your photo. This is because the season can vary widely depending on your location and elevation. A species that might not be expected to fly in late May could be corroborated by other unexpectedly late or early-flying species seen in the same location at the same time.
• Even blurry photographs can sometimes be identifiable, so don't hesitate to send what you have!
• If you can't get a photograph, give a clear description of what you saw and the record might still be accepted. For example, a "brown butterfly flying in sagebrush-steppe habitat" wouldn't be accepted because it could be any of three species of wood nymphs, but "a small white butterfly with orange-tipped wings" could only be a Julia's Orangetip, nothing else looks like it! While female Great Spangled Fritillaries look nothing like Mourning Cloaks when viewed side by side, they can easily be mistaken for Mourning Cloaks when they're flying because of the general darkness of their wings with the light tan/yellow border. If you can describe that you are seeing a butterfly with solid black (or reddish tinted in the sun) wings, an obvious thin yellow border on the wing and a row of blue spots just inside the border, we would be able to accept it as a Mourning Cloak record.

For Idaho butterflies, I am unaware of any efforts to document records in the state. However, because of the lack of field guides covering the whole state, I am considering writing a simple guide to Idaho butterflies, so am interested in compiling information about the distribution of species across the state. If you live in Idaho or visit often and would like to submit records, please send me data as described above for Washington and I will keep this information in a similar database.

For Oregon butterflies, there are records-keepers for the state but I am not up to speed on who the primary contacts are for submitting records. If you are interested in submitting Oregon records, let me know and I will try to put you in contact with the correct people. A great Oregon-specific butterfly resource is the new website launched by Neil Björklund: Butterflies of Oregon

In addition to the individual records-keepers, some records websites include:

Butterflies and Moths of North America (BAMONA)

eButterfly

iNaturalist

These websites are handy but they don't "talk" to each other and some of the users submit their records on more than one site, so it can be tricky for record-keepers to monitor all of them to glean information and to check for duplicate records between the sites. My recommendation is that if you wish to submit your records to these websites, you also send your data to a local records-keeper (myself or others).

Happy hunting!

Zerene Fritillaries at the Sinlahekin, July 2018

Reviewing the past while looking forward

Happy New Year!
I thought I'd kick off the new year by sharing a snippet of the books that fed my early interest in bugs. There were lots of books along the way, such as every insect-related book at the local library!
Possibly the first bug book I ever owned is one I had forgotten about until last week when it was uncovered while helping my mom clear out an old cupboard. It came with a little clear plastic case with a green lid for capturing and observing bugs. I was around 5-7 when I had this book, it and the "bug bottle" were well-used!

Next up, these were "family books", but as I was the one who used them all the time they came with me when I moved. They cover the entire US, so were too general to allow me to identify every single Pacific Northwest species in my backyard, but I was able to learn the groups and it whetted my appetite for more.

This was my first personally-owned "big-person bug book"... I still distinctly remember taking it off the shelf at Barnes & Noble in Bellevue and flipping through all the pictures, excited to see they were all color photographs! If I remember right, I was about 7-8 and it was the book I chose after either a dentist or doctor's appointment (Mom would reward my sister and I with a new book for good behavior after getting our shots or a trip to the dentist :) It still wasn't focused on the Northwest, but it helped encourage my interest even more.

I don't remember where or when exactly I acquired this book, but I was probably younger than ten and Mom wrote my name inside the cover in her pretty handwriting. It became my go-to butterfly book through my elementary and high school years, until I purchased Butterflies of Cascadia and other books I currently use. Somehow I never paid attention to who the author was until after I discovered the "butterfly people" (WBA and LepSoc) and learned about Bob Pyle, then realized I already had one of his books! He signed it while visiting me for the first time at my apartment in Vancouver, WA while I was finishing up grad school.

Another family book that wound up in my library :) I loved to just look through all the pictures in this book, so much inspiration! There is a lot of good information too, I used some of the ideas in my early attempts at rearing butterflies and moths.

Ahhh...Bug Wise! I loved this book! Much like the Amateur Naturalist but in a simple format that was more easily digestible in my younger years, I used it all the time.

This was similar to Bug Wise but included all wildlife and color illustrations. It was a fun little book but not as well-used as some of the others here.

Usborne Guides, like this and The Young Naturalist above, were staples for home schoolers. We loved to look at all the pictures and read the snippets. I would dream about all the habitats and wished I lived by a creek or pond so I could find all the critters these books talked about. My sister and I were thrilled when we discovered a bunch of tadpoles living in our "pond" (seasonal runoff from irrigating our cow pasture), we didn't think the water was nice enough that anything would live in it! We were so excited to get a closer look that we got permission from Dad to use his fish net to catch some...but we didn't pay attention to his directions and grabbed his long-handled smelt-dipping net hanging in the shed instead of the little hand net he had intended, haha...well as soon as he saw us trying to catch the tadpoles with that long net we were quickly corrected and had to thoroughly wash out that fancy net so the cow pond water wouldn't ruin it! Whoops! We eventually did catch some of the tadpoles and had fun studying their little suction mouth and developing legs. Fun times!

This was my first step into a more advanced level of entomology. I don't remember if I got this book before or after we moved to central Washington, but its instructions on how to collect insects and spread them are how I first learned and started my own collection at age 10 in central Washington. Those first few specimens were kept in plastic clamshell containers (like what donut holes and pastries come in) with some scraps of styrofoam blocks glued to the bottom. Unfortunately, I didn't know about dermestid beetles yet, and after a few years most of the specimens were eventually destroyed. I still have a Woodland Skipper (Ochlodes sylvanoides) pinned with a short sewing pin from that early collection, along with a couple other butterflies collected a year or two later and mounted a little more properly on insect pins (longer and thinner than sewing pins).

Another one of my favorite books, this one had lots of tips for what to look for during each season. I liked that it gave me ideas of things to do throughout the year, not just in different habitats like the other books. This was great for an active outdoors kid! It has a surprising amount of information packed into each segment.

To round off the collection, I didn't use this book as much but enjoyed reading through it occasionally and gleaning whatever tidbits I could.

I hope you've enjoyed this little walk through my history, I've enjoyed reminiscing! I hope the books I've authored will impact others in little ways like these and other books through my life have impacted me. I have several more projects in mind for the future, some I may never get around to, but half the fun is in the dreaming!
Happy 2019!

Winner of the National Outdoor Book Award!

Bob's and my book won the "nature guide" category of the 2018 National Outdoor Book Awards!

It came as a surprise to me because I didn't even know we were in the running, quite exciting!
To learn more about this award and to see the other winners in all ten categories, visit their website: National Outdoor Book Awards

Also, Bob and I will be at the Wild Arts Festival in Portland this weekend. We'd love to see you there! We'll be signing our book from 12-4pm on Saturday the 17th and 12-1:30pm on Sunday the 18th (Bob will be there until 4 on Sunday). The book will be available for sale during the festival, as will Bob's new novel, Magdalena Mountain.
To see the full schedule and information about parking and other authors and artists, visit the Wild Arts Festival website.

Western Tiger Swallowtail Surprise

During a stopover at my parents' place after a trip to Okanogan County, we were sitting in the shade under an old lilac bush when a huge swallowtail floated by and started hovering around in the upper branches directly above us. I noted that in spite of its large size, it was a Western Tiger Swallowtail (Papilio rutulus) and not a Two-tailed Tiger (P. multicaudata) because the width of the black stripes were very wide. My parents frequently see swallowtails, sulphurs and other butterflies nectaring on the lilac when it is blooming, but it had long gone to seed at this point so we weren't quite sure what this swallowtail was doing because it was hovering from place to place like it was looking for nectar. I moved away from the lilac to get a better look at the swallowtail and observed it appearing to curve its abdomen toward a leaf while continuing to flutter its wings...suddenly the thought hit me, it was ovipositing! I was a little surprised to see it doing this on lilac, as they usually are found on cottonwood, aspen, willow or wild cherry, but I was so excited at the prospect of finally rearing a tiger swallowtail that I didn't think about it much and focused on solving the problem of reaching that high branch.

This particular lilac bush is more like a tree with its multiple 6+ inch diameter gnarly trunks and 20+ foot height. We estimate it is over 70 years old based on the age of the homestead and the knowledge that the lilac was already well-established when the old house was torn down to build the current house. The branch in question was about 14 feet high, but a regular ladder was out of the question because there would be nothing safe to lean it against. I couldn't back my pickup close enough without scratching it...what to do? Dad to the rescue! He fired up his dump truck and had it backed into the lilac in no time, let down the metal panels on the back so we could climb up in it, then set up a six foot step ladder in the bed, which was about four feet off the ground. I was then able to climb almost to the top of the ladder and pull the branch towards me. After a couple minutes of searching I located the leaf and found the egg!

Looking for the Western Tiger Swallowtail (Papilio rutulus) egg on our giant lilac bush. Photo courtesy of Mom, truck and ladder courtesy of Dad :)

Our unconventional setup

Success! Western Tiger Swallowtail (Papilio rutulus) egg on lilac

With egg in hand, I then started thinking that I didn't recall ever reading anything about Western Tigers using lilac as a larval host. A few book and internet searches later, and the only reference to lilac I could find was Art Shapiro's website citing lilac as a host in California. Willow (Salix), poplar/cottonwood/aspen (Populus), wild cherry (Prunus) and ash (Fraxinus) are listed as the hosts everywhere, with sycamore (Platanus), privet (Ligustrum) and sweet gum (Liquidambar) also listed by Art Shapiro. Interestingly, lilac (Syringa) is in the olive family: Oleaceae, which ash and privet both belong to. After talking to Washington lepidopterists, it seems my find is the first record of Western Tigers using lilac in Washington, possibly even anywhere outside of California (if you have recorded them on lilac anywhere, shoot me an email). It is likely that it has just been overlooked all this time, or perhaps they prefer old (i.e. tall) heirloom varieties over more recent varieties that might be less attractive to the butterfly. In any case, if you have lilac bushes, closely watch your tiger swallowtails to see if you notice any strange behaviors around them instead of simply nectaring on the flowers! Now is the time of year to look for tiger swallowtail larvae on all of the hosts listed above - watch for a caterpillar resting in the center of the top of a leaf. Early instars look like bird poop but become a camouflaged green with two large "snake eyes" as they mature. If you find any let me know!

My adorable little cutie-pie, barely a millimeter across with little teddy bear ears

Western Tiger Swallowtail (Papilio rutulus) larva at about 5mm long soon after hatching.

I am rearing it on lilac; a couple 3ft high suckers that Dad dug up from around the base of the old lilac which I then brought home and potted. So far the larva seems to be doing well and has been feeding for about a week now. I'll continue to post photos of it as it grows.