Endangered butterfly missing from Cedar Rapids preserve

It may not have taken the long-delayed Highway 100 extension project, construction on which is now slated to begin in 2013, to drive out the Byssus skipper butterfly of highway-stopping fame.

As far back as 2001, butterfly experts and native prairie enthusiasts began to worry that the highway's construction would destroy vital prairie habitat for the Byssus skipper - a threatened butterfly species in Iowa - at the Rock Island Botanical Preserve just west of Xavier High School.

Something else, though, may have done what the highway hasn't yet had a chance to do.

Butterfly expert Dennis Schlicht reports that a sighting of the Byssus skipper hasn't been documented by butterfly experts since July 2009 on the 20-acre state-sanctioned Rock Island Preserve or on pieces of sand prairie nearby that are part of 100 acres donated to the preserve in 2002. One female of the species was spotted in July 2009, he said.

“When we came out here before, there were a lot of them,” Schlicht said of observations of the butterfly a decade or so ago. “You'd see them chasing back and forth. It wasn't a big issue to find one of them.”

With last month's decision by the Iowa Transportation Commission to approve $185 million in spending for the 7.5-mile highway project, Schlicht agreed to hike sections of the preserve's prairie where he and others identified the Byssus skipper in 2001.

Three times in the last three weeks he's walked amid the prairie's flowers and grasses and three times he's found no sign of the inch-long, brown butterfly.

At the same time, Chris Edwards, a Johnson County butterfly enthusiast, spent Wednesday hunting for the Byssus skipper at a site at Lake Macbride and three other nearby Johnson County sites to see if the Byssus skipper was there. It wasn't, though he did spot several at Shimek State Forest in southeast Iowa last week, he said.

Maybe the hot weather, suggested Edwards of Solon, pushed the skipper's 15-day-long life cycle as a butterfly to earlier in the year. Ever optimistic, Schlicht will be back next week at the Rock Island Preserve to look anew, with the thought that the Byssus skipper might yet emerge this month.

Even so, Schlicht, 64, a retired high school biology teacher and co-author of the book, “Butterflies of Iowa,” called it disappointing at the end of his Monday hike on the Rock Island Preserve because he had not identified one species of butterfly endemic to the habitat of a native tall grass prairie.

“There's nothing to raise your eyebrows about,” said Schlicht, who encountered some 15 species of butterflies on his walk on Monday. “There's nothing here you can't find in a typical backyard.”

Then he added, “It's to be expected.” He lists five or six other butterflies tied to Iowa's few remaining native prairies that have vanished from much of the state.

The 2001 find of the Byssus skipper on the original Rock Island Preserve and next to it gave preserve lovers and opponents of the Highway 100 extension project a first line of defense, which helped put the highway project on hold, helped prompt a more rigorous environmental review of the proposed project and ultimately moved the highway alignment a little farther away from the preserve.

Daryl Howell of the Iowa Department of Natural Resources said the Iowa Department of Transportation came up with several alternative alignments for the Highway 100 extension as a result of the resulting environmental reviews. The DOT, he addsed, picked the option that “best avoided adverse impacts to threatened and endangered species.”

For the Byssus skipper, Schlicht now said the DOT's decision to move the highway's alignment a bit to the north will protect the prairie spots where the butterfly was spotted in the past, though the Sierra Club of Iowa and two Cedar Rapids area residents continue to pursue litigation to stop the highway, arguing that the highway will hurt the habitat for a rare turtle and the Byssus skipper.

Schlicht said prairie habitats in Iowa are under pressure for reasons other than highway projects.

The way native prairies are managed, he said, can hurt the prospects of species like the Byssus skipper. He favors limited burning in small sections of a prairie over a number of years to cut back on the invasion of trees. Too much burning can harm the larvae and eggs of species like prairie butterflies, he said.

Dennis Goemaat, deputy director of the Linn County Conservation Board, said his office agrees with Schlicht and others and has tailored its prairie management practices at the Rock Island Preserve, which Linn County manages, accordingly. The pieces of prairie next to the original preserve, where most of the Byssus skippers were spotted in 2001, has not been burned since then, Goemaat adds.

If it wasn't prairie burning, perhaps, the Byssus skipper was nearing the end of its run at the preserve back a decade or so ago when it was easily spotted, Schlicht said.

“Did we see he last gasp of a population? Was there a long-term viable population?” he asks.

Another likely source of problems for the Byssus skipper near the Highway 100 alignment is the lack of connectivity between the few small prairie areas where the butterfly has been found. As a result, Byssus skippers located in one area may have been cut off from spots of prairie, hurting their chances at the preserve for long-term survival, explains Schlicht.

Linn County's Goemaat said as much. In the day when native prairie covered much of Iowa, finding a suitable home for a prairie butterfly was not a problem. Now, as corn and soybean fields abound, it's difficult to manage “little postage-stamp parcels” of remaining prairie to support species tied to the prairie, he said.

Most butterflies, Schlicht notes, live only a week to a month.

The male Byssus skipper, for instance, emerges at this time of the summer, the female follows about five days later, they mate, the female feeds on flowers and then lays eggs on grass. In about 15 days, they've all died.

“Sex, nectar and death,” said Schlicht.

The importance back in 2001 of finding a rare species like the Byssus skipper at the Rock Island Preserve, he said, was that it was an indication that the location had other rare elements as well. Even if gone today, the Byssus skipper played a role in raising a red flag and prompting a thorough environmental review of the Highway 100 extension project, Schlicht said.

Schlicht is a biologist, teacher and a butterfly expert, not an advocate for or against highway projects.

Now resigned that the highway project is moving ahead, Schlicht said the DOT can still take steps to make sure the highway is built to protect the prairie and the prairie's inhabitants that the highway will be near.

For instance, he would like to see the right of way along the four-lane highway planted as prairie and connected to prairie areas that exist nearby. There also needs to be a way for turtles and snakes to get under the highway so they aren't crushed trying to get across it, and Linn County's Goemaat said state plans call for a special passageway under the highway to be afforded the protected Blandings turtle that lives in the area.

In any event, said Schlicht, some wildlife will die once the highway opens.

He and Goemaat both recall the TV news coverage on the first day when the newest section of Highway 100 between First Avenue East and Highway 13 opened in late 1996.

Goemaat said he was being interviewed on camera by a local news crew in the evening when all of a sudden there was a loud thump. Sure enough, a car had struck a deer in the background.

“When you take a road through an area that was wild and the animals aren't used to it, it's going to be a slaughter for a while,” said Schlicht.