Winged Beauty
Heads Up -- It's Butterfly Season Around the Bay

Jesse Hamlin, San Francisco Chronicle Staff Writer
1999-04-23

Who doesn't delight in the sudden sight of a butterfly, a patch of orange or yellow floating through the air or feeding on some blazing blue flower?

Certainly the mice and birds that dine on butterflies are happy to see them. So are people who feast their eyes on these ephemeral beauties that have transformed themselves from creeping larvae into winged creatures of exquisite color and grace.

With the weather warming, the next few weeks should be an excellent time to see a variety of butterflies around the Bay Area. You can also see a cluster of them Sunday at the Contra Costa Earth Day celebration at the Concord Pavilion, where kids will release hundreds of painted ladies.

They're being provided by the Butterfly Gardeners Association, a Berkeley group that promotes the nurturing of butterfly habitats in schools and communities as a way of creating a healthier, more peaceful planet.

"Butterflies tend to bring out the best in people," says the association's founder, Alan Moore, who raises them in his home. "They're inspiring. They bring out the very essence of love, beauty, harmony and our connection to nature."

That's undoubtedly why more and more people are planting butterfly gardens in these perilous times. And for those who wouldn't mind paying to see butterflies from around the world in a huge glass conservatory, a nonprofit group called Coevolution Fund is trying to build a museum for butterflies and other bugs on a grassy knoll along San Francisco's Embarcadero. Open-space advocates are fighting the plan, which is still in political limbo.

The Human Threat

The encroachment of suburbs and other human activity has destroyed a lot of butterfly habitats over the past 60 years. Several local butterfly species have become extinct -- notably the Xerces blue, which laid its eggs on the lupine in the sand dunes that once covered the west side of San Francisco.

Four species are on the endangered species list -- the San Bruno elfin, Mission blue, Lange's metalmark and Myrtle's fritillary -- and a fifth, the Bay checkerspot, once seen in abundance, is listed as threatened.

"One sees fewer butterflies than one would have seen in terms of diversity 20 or 25 years ago," says Paul Ehrlich, the eminent Stanford environmental biologist. "We've paved over a lot of their habitats."

Biologist Carol Boggs, director of Stanford's Center for Conservation Biology, offers an additional reason that "there are fewer individual butterflies than there were 20 to 30 years ago:" the introduction of non-native plants that crowd out the indigenous ones the butterflies need.

But not all scientists agree. Although some species are endangered, "I don't know of any real data indicating there is a progressive decline in the numbers of butterflies," says Jerry Powell, a University of California at Berkeley professor emeritus of entomology. The best place to see butterflies, he suggests, is along any creek.

You can see many species right now in the Marin Headlands.

"We're going to have an abundance of butterflies this spring," says Mia Monroe, a ranger-naturalist with the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, a prime spot for enjoying wildflowers and the butterflies they attract.

Both the nectar flowers the butterflies eat and the "host" plants on which they lay their eggs are blooming in profusion, says Monroe, site supervisor at Muir Woods.

Brief Lives

As a result, the butterflies -- swallowtails and buckeyes, blue echoes and mourning cloaks among them -- have started emerging from their chrysalises to engage in a busy week of mating, eating and egg-laying. It sounds fun, but most will die within a week or so. They pack a lot of living into the short span of their adult lives.

"Everything is blooming and hatching," Monroe says. You won't see big clusters of butterflies, like when the monarchs are "overwintering" in Santa Cruz or Pacific Grove. "It's more like, 'Oh, there's one, and there's another,'" says Monroe, who suggests simply walking along the trails attuned to nature in all its interrelated forms.

Where Butterflies Are Free: Great spots to go butterfly-watching.