We live in a world of skippers and blues, swallowtails and whites, crescents, commas, and checkerspots. Nature and evolution have splattered some butterflies with glitter, left some a clover green and given others the pattern of a retro lampshade.
To spot them, it helps to have a guide. “Commas follow the creek,” Cynthia Scholl says. “The skipper is smart and wily. The silvery blue is bumbling.”
Scholl and her husband, Kevin Burls, are lepidopterists, trained to study the hidden personalities of butterflies. Every time we hop out of the car, the pair grabs fine mesh fishing nets so when a butterfly spurts past us, they are ready to spring up and dash toward it, swinging side to side — and up and down — in the air (there is a skill to it). “A nokomis!” Scholl shouts. “I think that was a mourning cloak,” Burls says, before darting after it.
As this recent ride-along taught me, going out in the field involves a lot of running back and forth, though not simply for the fun of it. Burls and Scholl’s sprints across roads and into meadows are in service of collecting more information about our distant invertebrate relatives. They are here with an important mission: to better understand the biodiversity of an insect order that faces threats in Nevada and across the globe.
The eastern slope of the Great Basin’s Sweetwater Range towers above us, hiding the extent of the Sierra Nevada to the west. There are scores of butterflies in these mountains, as the terrain changes with the elevation gain. On this day in May, Scholl and Burls want to search for butterflies that have not been spotted here in a long time, species such as the Edith’s checkerspot.
Butterfly populations in the western U.S. have declined over the past four decades. The causes are legion, but many point to humans: pesticides, habitat loss, and a changing climate. It’s an issue facing terrestrial insects across the globe. They are the beetles, grasshoppers, ants, and bees, the nymphs and the flies that make up the core of many food chains.
Compared to butterflies, “wasps and flies are the underdogs,” forgotten, small creatures often regarded as invisible until they become nuisances. If many people are oblivious of butterflies, classifying everything as a monarch, even more are blind to other insects. “I’m okay putting Kevin and me on that spectrum, too,” Scholl says.
She is the associate director of Nevada Bugs and Butterflies, and Burls is a biologist for the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation. Through their jobs and in their free time, they’ve dedicated their life to observing what is left of these species and raising awareness for their protection. That involves education — bringing people (like me) into the field, for instance. Another element is observation, surveying the places butterflies go and whether they return each year.
When we start the day, I’m skeptical we will see much. I know from experience and from talking to biologist friends that field days are notoriously hit or miss. I prepare for the worst. Also, butterflies are so small, and they feel like rare occurrences to me. As Scholl and Burls’ truck moves past western Nevada alfalfa fields, and we start to traverse the foothills of the Sweetwaters, my assumption is quickly proven wrong. If you are strategic about where you look, butterflies are everywhere.
Instead of searching for butterflies directly, Scholl and Burls use proxies. They look for the plants that butterfly species rely upon. Flower nectar is their drink of choice, and so we look for that. It’s an unyielding search, so much so that the presence of the right flowers and nectar dictates all our stops throughout the day, including where we eat lunch. They select the meadow where we eat because it holds a clover known as habitat for the Duskywing butterfly.
“The plant is everything for the butterfly,” Burls says.
We’re talking about the ethics of physical butterfly collection in the age of photography, when Scholl leaps out of her chair and grabs her instruments. “There’s a blue,” she says, as a butterfly floats by aimlessly. It’s a beautiful species, even if it’s not the Duskywing we hope to see.
Scholl and Burls use detailed paper guidebooks to compare species traits and patterns. Their taxonomic conclusions often come down to precise observations, similar to how a radiologist might see something you would never notice in an X-ray. The whole thing seems daunting, and I start to wonder how anyone can pack so much of this information into their brain.
I ask Burls, and he says, “The best thing you can do to remember a name is look at it in real life.” He tells me to trust him, that the experience of seeing a butterfly “locks itself in.”
NEVADA MIGHT SEEM an unlikely place to devote your life to searching for butterflies. But as with so many things about this state, the perception of lack could not be further from the truth. Where many see vacant land, Scholl and Burls see a state that is sixth in the nation for its endemic species, with more than 300 species of flora or fauna that exist in only one place on the planet. For butterfly diversity, Nevada ranks eighth in the nation. There are at least 200 unique species of butterfly in the state — a mirror of the state’s geographic diversity.
The basin and range pattern that crosses the state has created isolated mountain ranges varying in habitat as you move from lower to higher elevation. Butterfly diversity requires plant diversity, which requires water to ensure the plants thrive. But it also helps to have “ecotones,” transitional spaces where different ecosystems collide. It’s one reason there are about 20 species in the Spring Mountains, including the endangered Mount Charleston blue butterfly near Lee Canyon.
“When you have elevational differences, you get these ecotones in a matter of two or three miles over 1,000 feet,” Burls says. “We end up going to foothills of mountains for lots of butterflies.”
Scholl and Burls’ work to make butterflies more visible is important because species like them often fly under the radar. We aren’t the only ones blind to the insects flying around us; so are the laws meant to protect wildlife. Across the country, wildlife agencies lack adequate authority to protect insects, according to The New York Times, leaving bugs and butterflies in a legal black hole.
Nevada’s agencies are among them, although blindness to insects’ risks is starting to change. Earlier this year, the state’s Department of Wildlife included terrestrial invertebrates in its wildlife action plan for the first time. It listed 66 invertebrates at risk, including 42 butterflies.
Still, there remain gaps in the state’s authority to act. Matt Forister, a UNR
biology professor who focuses on insects, says entomologists historically resisted regulations, especially for butterflies. There was a perception that insects could not be managed like vertebrate wildlife. But he sees that beginning to shift.
“Many of the younger folks in the insect world now realize that we’ve got to start figuring out some things to do, and they are not going to be as simple as ‘You can’t kill some species,’” he says. “It’s more like we need better habitat protections. We need better pesticide regulations in particular. And we also will end up needing to list more species as a tool for protecting [them].”
BURLS IS FROM OHIO originally and met Scholl, who grew up in Reno, at UNR. It was, appropriately enough, during Forister’s plant and insect interaction class. It’s not hard to see how they hit it off. They test each other’s taxonomic hypotheses, and both share the same awe of butterflies’ adaptation to everything from salt brush canyons to the edges of alkaline lake beds — even sand dunes.
“Those are hardscrabble places to make a living,” Burls says. “And the folks that live here know that, and so, I think that should and does speak to them — that these are animals that are making a living in an extreme environment, and we are all part of that environment.”
As the afternoon sun blares down, we’ve seen almost 15 species at least of butterfly, stopping at different waypoints along the Sweetwater Range. We have yet to see any of the rare butterflies we’re trying to find. Some of them have not been spotted in many years, and I ask how they determine when a species has been extirpated from an area. It’s a tough and sobering question, and it’s an equally tough call to make.
Then everyone stops. Scholl sees what looks to be an Edith’s checkerspot. My heartbeat races a little; their enthusiasm and the long day of pursuit has rubbed off on me. Until that moment, I didn’t realize how invested I’d become in seeing a rare butterfly for this area.
The butterfly was perched on a plant with small white flowers, waving its wings and oblivious to our presence. Scholl crouched down with her camera to take a few photos, and I did the same (this is how they would verify it). I took some video, too, as it bounced from flower to flower, opening and closing its wings, showing off and hiding its patterns. I stayed to watch, even after Scholl and Burls had moved on. Maybe Burls was right, that the experience of seeing first-hand “locks itself in.”
The next day, I emailed Burls to send him the video, and he replied that they were now not sure we had seen an Edith’s checkerspot after all. I felt deflated but held onto hope. When I checked in a few weeks later, it was the first question I asked: Did they verify it?
It turns out what we saw was the Variable checkerspot. They figured this out from few small signs: The Variable has white stripes on its abdomen, and Edith’s does not. Edith’s also has two red bands on its hind wing, which the Variable does not have.
“I’m sad we didn’t find it,” Scholl says. “But I think you got a sense of what it’s like. There’s the species that you know right away. There’s the ones that you need to think about and ask an expert to see what they think.”
I ask how many more times they’ll go back and keep looking for it, and Burls replies, “I will go back to that spot every year until I find it. I would really like to know if it’s there or not.” ✦