Understanding and Finding Butterflies
Where and When to Look
Although butterflies seem very fragile, they are sturdy enough to be found almost everywhere on our planet. The greatest variety is found in the steaming rainforests of the Amazon basin. Still, butterflies also live in the deserts, on the tops of our tallest mountains, in the vast and treeless expanses of the arctic tundra, and, of course, in your backyard.
Your backyard or neighborhood park isn’t a bad place to start looking. At some point, you may want to explore regions a bit farther afield. One of the great joys of butterflying is learning the locations of all the little nooks and crannies that serve as interesting natural habitats in your neighborhood.
As you search for butterflies, it is helpful to keep in mind what butterflies like. Most like flowers. Learn the important wild nectar sources in your region (See the table on page 16 for a beginning list). Then, when you see a stand of these plants, you will know to check them for nectaring butterflies.
Most butterflies like sunshine. Look for open areas with natural vegetation: wet meadows or dry meadows, prairies, oak savannas, brushland. These are all productive butterfly habitats. When you are butterflying, you should be drenched with sunshine.
Most species like complexity. Fields filled with only a very few types of plants will not have many different species of butterflies. Look for areas with a great diversity of plants. Even better, look for areas where different habitats come together. A wet meadow adjacent to a dry meadow is more productive than either habitat alone. An area where a wet meadow meets a dry meadow at the edge of an oak woodland is a butterflier’s paradise.
One strategy for locating suitable areas is to travel along the roads near where you live, stopping whenever you see a likely spot. Another approach is to find power-line rights-of-way or railroad beds and follow these as they slice through the suitable habitats. A bonus to this method is that the powerline cuts and railroad beds themselves are often excellent habitats for butterflies.
Look on a map of your region and locate state, county, and local parks. These areas, if they are not too manicured, may well provide good butterfly habitat. Contact the state or local office of The Nature Conservancy and find out where their preserves are located. These important natural areas are often home to a variety of butterflies.
Butterfly Concentrators
Now that you’ve found some likely looking habitats for butterflies, it’s time to look for the butterflies themselves. Sometimes, butterflies are everywhere, by the thousands. But many times, the numbers of butterflies are much smaller. When this is the case, you want to find features of the environment that concentrate the butterflies. Here are a few suggestions.
Flowers
The importance of flowers in finding and observing butterflies can’t be overemphasized. Walking along a dry streambed in the Southwest, a strategically placed stand of Baccharis (groundsel tree) can be a blessing.
Hilltops
Locating accessible hilltops is useful almost everywhere and especially important throughout the American West.
Mud Puddles
Damp sand or gravel attracts many butterflies. Look for places where dirt roads cross streams or along a stream where there is wet sand.
Trails
Not only are butterflies easier to see along a trail, the trail itself serves to concentrate some of them. Believe it or not, many butterflies, such as buckeyes, prefer trails to undisturbed vegetation.
When to Find Butterflies
Most butterflies like it warm and sunny. Thus for successful butterflying you generally want a sunny day with a temperature of greater than about 60 degrees F. The hotter the day, the less critical sunshine becomes. Although there are certainly exceptions, most butterflies don’t really fly until after 9:00 a.m. In many locations and times of the year, there is little activity before 10:00 a.m. Relax and have a leisurely breakfast.
Most butterflies like it warm and sunny. Thus for successful butterflying you generally want a sunny day with a temperature of greater than about 60 degrees F. The hotter the day, the less critical sunshine becomes. Although there are certainly exceptions, most butterflies don’t really fly until after 9:00 a.m. In many locations and times of the year, there is little activity before 10:00 a.m. Relax and have a leisurely breakfast.
A World of Butterflies
Worldwide, there are roughly 20,000 kinds of butterflies, about twice as many butterfly species as bird species. Needless to say, it would be extremely difficult for anyone to see all of the butterflies of the world. The greatest diversity occurs in Central and South America where there are approximately 7,500 species.
More than 700 species of butterflies have been recorded in North America north of Mexico, roughly comparable to the bird list for the region. For this same area, about 130 of these species occur only as strays, mainly to the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, and perhaps another 15 are primarily Arctic.
This leaves something like 572 species found with some regularity in the lower 48 states. To find all or close to all of these species is a real challenge. Many species of butterflies have quite limited ranges. If you want to see the mountain fritillary in the contiguous 48 states, you must backpack into the Wind River Mountains of Wyoming. For the Avalon scrub-hairstreak, you must travel to the California Island of Santa Catalina (not much of a hardship here). Ozark swallowtails fly where you’d expect them to fly. Silver-banded hairstreaks fly only in the Florida Keys and South Texas. So you’re unlikely to run out of wonderful localities to visit! In addition, you must visit these localities more than once. That’s because different species will be flying at different times of the year. In the first two weeks of July, you must be 50 different places at once.
State lists vary from a low of about 100 species to a high of more than 400 species recorded in Texas.
But you may be more interested in how many butterflies you can find in the area close to your home. In most of the United States, I would say a very rough number would be about 100 species. If you live in Maine, the number will be lower; if you live in the Rio Grande Valley, it will be much higher.
Moth-Butterfly Distinction
One of the most common questions people ask about butterflies is, “What’s the difference between a moth and a butterfly?” Before answering this, let’s look at where butterflies fit in the overall scheme of living animals. Butterflies and moths belong with the vast army of animals that lack a backbone—invertebrates.
Within this group are the insects, the most numerous class of animals on the earth. The insect class is broken up into different “orders”—beetles, dragonflies and damselflies, and so on. One of these orders consists of the lepidoptera—moths and butterflies. The word “lepidoptera” means scaly-winged. Scaled wings are characteristic of moths and butterflies.
Scientists have further divided the lepidoptera into groups of related species. One of these groups is the group we call butterflies. All the other groups we call moths. There are more than 100,000 moth species.
So, how can we tell a butterfly from a moth? Well, scientists use a mass of technical characteristics that distinguish the butterflies quite well but which would be difficult for the average person to apply. I will point out a few generalities that work most of the time. First, almost all adult butterflies fly during the daytime (only one group of tropical butterflies flies at night). In contrast, the vast majority of moths are nocturnal, i.e., they fly at night. However, there are many moths that fly during the day.
Second, most moths have a structure, called the frenulum, that hooks the forewing to the hind wing. This results in a flight pattern that is stiff and herky-jerky. Butterflies lack a frenulum and thus, in general, fly much more gracefully than most moths.
Lastly, look carefully at the antennas. Almost all moth antennas are either slender, tapering filaments or look somewhat like radio antennas, with lots of cross-hairs. In contrast, butterfly antennas are simple filaments that have a noticeable swelling, called the club, at their end.
As you gain experience looking at butterflies, you will find that you won’t need to rely on any of these characteristics. You will soon recognize a butterfly by its overall “feel,” or appearance.
Dispersal and Migration
Most butterflies live and die close to the spot where they were born. But, because butterflies have wings, they are capable of moving long distances. Let’s look at two types of movements.
Some of the adults in a butterfly colony will leave, looking for a new home. These individuals disperse, radiating out from where they were born to populate new areas. So, although many butterflies are habitat restricted—such as Hessel’s hairstreak which is normally only found in white cedar swamps—it is possible to find a butterfly out of habitat.
Many butterflies that spend the summer in the northern half of the United States cannot survive northern winters. Each year, as the weather becomes warmer, butterflies from the southern United States, or from Mexico, fly north to repopulate these regions.
Species that move northward each year include cloudless sulphur, little yellow, painted lady, red admiral, clouded skipper, Sachem, and fiery skipper. In especially good years, one can see cloudless sulphurs and painted ladies streaming out of northern Mexico.
The reverse migration for these species, south in the fall, is far less obvious. But for another group of butterflies autumnal southward movement is more obvious. On one September day I observed about 6,000 monarchs, 4,000 red admirals, 4,000 question marks, and 2,000 mourning cloaks flying south through a 10-foot-wide path adjacent to a beach in New York City.
We don’t really know if the red admirals, mourning cloaks, and other species concentrate in some areas for the winter. In fact, we know very little about the details of most butterfly movements. But we do have some information about monarchs.
West of the Rocky Mountains, monarchs fly the relatively short distance to the central California coast, where they spend the winter in large communal roosts.
The adult monarchs in all of North America east of the Rockies fly southward in the fall, often forming impressive congregations at resting stops along the way. These monarchs eventually make their way to the Transvolcanic Range of Mexico, about 150 miles west of Mexico City. There, high in the fir-clad mountains, perhaps 100 million of these orange-and-black butterflies blanket the trees, color the sky, and create one of the great spectacles of the natural world.
In the spring, these monarchs begin flying north. Only a small minority make it back to the northern United States. The rest lay eggs on milkweeds in northern Mexico and the southern United States. Their offspring then finish the migration north.