COMMUNITY JOURNALISM: Butterfly count produces a few surprises

Editor's note: Rick Hollis, 64, of rural North Liberty, is past president and newsletter editor for the Iowa City Bird Club.

By Rick Hollis, community contributor

As I visited the Iowa City Butterfly Count in July, I had knowledge of some of the better-known butterflies - monarchs and swallowtails - and some of the smaller ones.

But I had no idea you could see 30-plus species in a day.

Chris Edwards, our leader and chief butterfly guru, Dave Kyllingstad, Peter Hansen and I started at Kent Park's CEC & Valley View Prairie, looking over the fields, looking at vegetation and walking around the ponds. I left at noon, but the group continued on to Hawkeye Wildlife Area and Lake Macbride.

While the rest of us concentrated on spotting butterflies - “There is a little yellow job” - Edwards made the identifications and taught us details to look for on our adventure.

“That one is an American snout,” he said. “If you look carefully you can see its long proboscis.

“This is an Eastern Tailed-blue, you can tell it from the other small blue one, Summer Azure, because it has orange spots on the hind wing and a tendency to fly low.”

The neatest thing we saw was a butterfly egg. Edwards noticed a Cloudless Sulphur was flitting from plant to plant, barely pausing on partridge pea, and told us, “it is laying eggs.”

After the butterfly left, I bent down and turned the leaf over and we found a tiny bluish egg, about the size of the period at the end of this sentence.

For butterfly identification, Edwards recommends “Butterflies through Binoculars” by Jeffrey Glassberg and “Butterflies of North America”.

The totals for this year's count were 36 species and 837 individuals. The number of species seen is a bit above average, but the number of individuals is well below. The 14-year average is 34 species and 1,013 individual butterflies. Not only were these numbers odd, but the numbers of certain species were strange.

Little Yellows and Dainty Sulphurs were seen in record numbers (together making up nearly half of the total), five more species were seen in above average numbers. Eleven species were seen in numbers significantly below average. Five species normally seen were missed altogether.

Very few species were seen feeding on flowers' nectar, which is unusual. We discussed the odd number and came up with several possibilities, including the drought (which may have reduced flowers' ability to produce nectar), the heat (which sure slowed me down) and the fact that so many species flowered earlier than usual.

All in all it was an odd count. I can't wait to see what next year will bring.

For more information about counts or butterflies, go to the North American Butterfly Association's website at www.naba.org

The Iowa City Butterfly Count is one of more than 400 held in the United States, Canada and Mexico. Iowa had six counts last year.

Here are our count totals from the July trip:

Black Swallowtail 1**, Giant Swallowtail 1, Eastern Tiger Swallowtail 5**, Checkered White 11*, Cabbage White 33**, Clouded Sulphur 93, Orange Sulphur 86, Cloudless Sulphur 16*, Little Yellow 306*, Dainty Sulphur 97*, Gray Hairstreak 1, Eastern Tailed-Blue 48, Summer Azure 6**, American Snout 2, Variegated Fritillary 1, Great Spangled Fritillary 5**, Meadow Fritillary 7, Pearl Crescent 11, Question Mark 1**,

American Lady 2, Painted Lady 3, Red Admiral 5**, Common Buckeye 28*, Viceroy 7†, Common Wood-Nymph 2**, Monarch 11**, Silver-spotted Skipper 10, Common Checkered-Skipper 6*, Common Sootywing 2, Least Skipper 8**, Fiery Skipper 17*, Peck's Skipper 1, Northern Broken-Dash 1, Sachem 1, Delaware Skipper 1, and Dun Skipper 1.

*Record high count

**Significantly below average.