Of Butterflies and Roadside Woes

The following was published in our local newspaper, the Panama City News Herald. Out of this came an invitation from Dr. Neil Lamb of the local Audubon Society. Out of the presentation came a meeting today with the Florida DOT, Audubon, Master Gardeners, PC Womens Club, Panama City Garden Club and other interested parties. We're going to see if we can keep our roadsides neat, safe and pretty and at the same time, give the creatures that live in and from wildflowers happy, too.

My neighbor generously shares her canal-side dock with me. It’s where I go to feed fish, observe the lilypad highway and hunt with my camera. The morning before yesterday, I spotted the beautiful caterpillar of Eumorpha fasciatus, a large, elegantly patterned moth. However, its caterpillar, grazing on its host plant, a type of mallow at the water’s edge, is incredible in color; a bright, mosaic pattern of black, yellow and red. It’s big; as long and as wide as a man’s index finger and totally harmless. I always call them “jazzy”.

“Aha,” I thought to myself. “I will photograph it in the late afternoon when the light is just right.”

I took my walk late that day, and noticed a lawn care truck parked in front of my neighbor’s yard. She’s had knee surgery, and hasn’t been able to keep it the way she wants. But it looks neat-as-a-pin to me. Maybe a little too neat, in my opinion. But it’s her yard.

I never went back that day, but I was up early to catch the soft morning light, camera in hand, to photograph “my” caterpillar.

Weed eaters had totally destroyed the fringe of tall grasses and aquatic plants that stood at the foot of the bank. Gone were the duck potatoes, the pickerel weed, the mallow with the fluorescent yellow flower and red-striped leaves that was home and diner to the caterpillar.

Fragments of vegetation lay on the bank and floated in the water. There was no trace of the caterpillar. Without its host plant, it could not survive anyway.

One of my hobbies is photographing insects; what you normally would not notice, except for the obvious ones, like butterflies and dragonflies, and maybe wasps, thinking all are dangerous.

So saddened by the destruction of the caterpillar, I stood in my yard, which I can proudly say is not “neat-as-a-pin”. It’s just the way I want it. On my circle, only my neighbor to the east feels the way I do. Your weeds are my wildflowers.

In my favorite wildflower (Bidens alba, a plant merrily blooming right now along the roadside in bushy patches of white daisy-like flowers), is a flower wasp with the interesting habit of keeping its second pair of legs raised up over its head. Click. Its image is on my memory stick. So is the beautiful orange, black and white Ailanthus web moth. Click. A common sulphur flies by me. I check my watch. Right on time. Sulphurs start moving here around 10 or 11 in the morning, but their favorite flowers are trumpet shaped and they are not blooming in my yard this year. Gulf Fritillaries – you’ve seen them – orange with flashing silver spots on their underwings are now coming to the Bidens. A little later comes a Monarch, steadying itself on the small white flowers.

Did you notice something this year? There are barely any wildflowers lining our ditches or the roads. There are patches of Bidens, but not many, because the mowers are destroying them. But that’s not only what they are destroying in the swath of stubble they leave behind.

The butterflies are migrating now. If you have ever noticed, most arrive in August, on their way to south Florida and beyond, and even into Mexico. Even more than Monarchs, the Gulf Fritillaries are desperate for food as they fly south. They need Bidens for nectar, and other natives on which to lay their eggs, if they lay multiple broods. If the plants are mowed when they are blooming, they cannot set seed. If they can’t reseed, they will eventually disappear. And so will the other species dependent on them. The mowers don’t see the drama of life hidden in the leaves and flowers of Bidens and wild morning glories, mahogany vine, and the other plants which insects need to complete their life cycles. The predators, from ants to damselflies, grasshoppers, toads to snakes and lizards, to birds, all benefit from these native wildflowers.

Several years ago, Claude Duncan, then of the News Herald, wrote a column about Monarch migration, following the golden highway. There is virtually no “gold” this year.

I have photographs taken four or five years ago, when masses of golden flowers, and spires of lavendar Liatris grew in our ditches. What happened? Drought complicates things, but mowing is sure to devastate a natural, and naturally beautiful resource if it is done at the wrong time.

I posted the short version of this to one of my butterfly lists – The International Lepidopterist Society. The response has been quite something and I have found that in some communities where mowing kept the wildflowers down, public comment has persuaded the city fathers to halt the mowing until the flowers are gone. In addition, it was suggested to me that I bring this issue to the attention of the local newspaper, and go on from there. Is it possible for the municipalities and the Florida DOT (who plants wild seed to bloom in spring – NOT in butterfly season), to mow AFTER the flowers are gone? Mission, Texas has a butterfly festival.

Maybe we could have one here? We don’t have a butterfly house – a festival would be so much easier.

After reading this, you may feel this is much ado about nothing. But if you feel that way, I ask you to take this challenge. Find a spot where Bidens alba grows. Stand there in the middle of the patch and be still. Just watch what unfolds. You will see butterflies – Common and West Indian Buckeyes, Gulf Fritillaries, American Painted Ladies (if you’re lucky), Monarchs and sometimes, the several varieties of swallowtails. You will see the skippers. They are easily identified by their somewhat plainer colors, big eyes and small size. They are everywhere. The wasps, solitary bees and bumblebees won’t bother you at all. They are nectaring. Some predatory wasps who are thin-waisted and shiny, iridescent black with unusual coloration in their wings, are not only nectaring, but hunting for insects to bring to a tunnel dug in the sand, where the egg is laid on the stunned, unlucky insect for the larvae to eat. Did you know there are nectar-eating mosquitoes that don’t sting? Well, now you do. Or that some species of flies we think of as “dirty”, take advantage of the nectar in these plants, too?

You may see a flower, crab or a green lynx spider catch and kill a bumblebee many times its size; or see one take a butterfly or moth. Day flying micro moths, some rare, are hiding on the undersides of leaves, and your footsteps through the flowers will disturb them.

Yesterday I took my camera out on CR 2301 and a boy on rollerblades came up to me and asked what I was doing.

.I explained and told him why I thought it was worthwhile. He was a student at Waller Elementary. We watched and talked for a good half hour. I spoke about the obvious – the beauty of the insects, this small environmental niche and why it was important. I told him the names of what was flying. Did he ever see a fuzzy, orange bumblebee with green eyes? It was nectaring in the Bidens just inches away. He was afraid of wasps – one had stung him once.
But here he stood beside me, beads of sweat on our foreheads (I could have been his grandmother), and he became so absorbed and unafraid, that he didn’t want to leave.

Maybe he’ll be the one to point out the eyespots on a Buckeye’s wings and tell them what they’re for or tell someone about pollen baskets on a bee or describe the color of a Fiery Skipper.

Maybe you’ll read this, and be curious enough to find one of these patches before it’s mowed. When you return, surprised at what you’ve seen, you might even pick up the phone
and tell a friend. And then maybe, you’ll make a call to ask that the mowers be silenced just until the flowers have gone, and in that simple act, you may have saved a butterfly or two.

Here's a roadside wildflowers (not all of them) a mower might encounter. It's rather long, but it's pretty.