6

The Crooked Way to Kissimmee

On Sanibel and its daughter isle, Captiva, landscapers seem to have studiously avoided the provision of any useful plants. The chief floral element, a yellow composite, is at least native but never attracted a butterfly in our experience. Sanibel gardeners eschew the butterflies’ favorite, lantana, with apparent disgust. Yet our best resource was a patch of golden mound lantana, not far from Campbell’s house by bicycle, that somehow escaped the pogrom. So I was excited to visit a large garden planted expressly for Florida butterflies, the one Dr. Rembos had recommended.

At Pelican Preserve in Fort Myers, the Crooked Garden had more nectar than I’d seen on Sanibel for weeks—purple trailing lantana, golden mound lantana, penta, flame vine, ageratum, and much more. Beginning with a monarch on a bright red penta, I saw a dozen species in no time—among them queens, buckeyes, gulfs, peacocks, zebras, and an uberfly of a black swallowtail on ageratum—wow! Spectacular she was, and new for the year. Jim Price, resident curator of the Crooked Garden, joined me and pointed out their live pupae, including a green one on a parsley leaf. Then a rosy orange-barred sulphur dropped a big teardrop pearl of an egg on a fresh leaf of Cassia.

Jim is an advanced martial artist and a retired pharmaceutical rep. After building a small butterfly garden for his wife, he came here and saw the beginnings of one that could be “like a racetrack for wheelchairs”—that is, big! He went away with the title of curator. The garden that resulted is big, all right—twelve thousand square feet big. At first, the butterfly garden was a joke, here in the Kingdom of Golf. But since then, many residents and others—Dr. Rembos’s dad among them—have come to admire, enjoy, and contribute to it. Now the source of much proprietary pride, the Crooked Garden is often called “the treasure of Pelican Preserve.” I told Jim honestly that it was one of the best I’d seen, by several measures—so much nectar, many caterpillar host plants, and highly varied overall.

Intense, driving, and emotional, Jim is the perfect complement to Robert Cramer, the soft-spoken and laid-back landscape supervisor. Robert is a great plantsman, Jim a great doer. They make an effective team. Jim’s poem for the place is mounted on a stucco wall behind a bench on the whimsical scenic overlook in the northwest corner of the garden:

 

There is a crooked garden with

crooked little paths

And crooked little caterpillars

crawling through the grass.

There are crooked little butterflies

Enjoying garden treats,

And all these wonders here to view

From this crooked garden seat.

 

After sorting, packing, swimming three times in the pool, shutting up Coquina House, and making the visit I’d promised myself to the famous shell museum, I made my getaway just in time—Sanibel was filling up like crazy for the weekend. I paid the six-dollar bridge toll for the last time and struck north for Kissimmee. East of Alva I passed into orange groves, and all of a sudden it hit me—orange blossom! The late golden afternoon was awash in the heavenly scent, which some find almost unbearably cloying. The trees bore both fruit and flower at the same time. As I northed toward Sebring, the citrus sun strobed through the rows of orange trees, spilling an orange splash behind the orange-dotted groves, everything in sight bathed in the sweet perfume.

At Annie’s 98 Restaurant on Highway 98, I could hear the races at Sebring Speedway tearing open the night. (Later, everyone leaving the races thought he was at the speedway; two cars were in the ditch, and several more belonged there.) I guess I could have been a little speedier myself getting here—I was two hours later than planned—but my friends waited for me. Alana Edwards and Buck and Linda Cooper are some of the best butterfliers in Florida. They’d offered to show me some fine habitat and hospitality; I was only sorry that Alana’s mom, Lana, was ill and couldn’t join us. Buck treated us to catfish and beer as we made plans for the dawning. There was karaoke, including a truly bad “I Got You Babe” with a guy in drag, no beauty, as Cher. Alana said she and I should do Kenny and Dolly singing “Islands in the Stream.” Lovely Alana, a former model, would have been great, and I at least looked the part. But mercifully, I didn’t know it.

We all overnighted at the Riverwoods Field Laboratory in Cornwell on the Kissimmee River, where Alana had once worked in watershed education. In the Rookery, a handsome house under live oaks and Spanish moss, we slept to a concert of night noises composed of donkey, cow, wild pig, barred owl, Chuck-will’s-widow, insects, frogs, toads, and I don’t know what all.

Fresh-squeezed OJ from local orchards went down well with Linda’s Irish soda bread and eggs for breakfast. Our day’s objective was the great Kissimmee, largest remnant of the extensive prairies that once covered much of central Florida. Buck and Linda had written up the region’s butterfly allurements as a “Definitive Destination” in the useful occasional series by that name in American Butterflies, and I was psyched to see it. They pulled out with Alana in their van, and I followed in single-seater Powdermilk.

We entered Kissimmee Prairie Preserve State Park to eastern meadowlark song through Bahia, a grass used for pasture on the biggest dry prairies. We drove the roads looking for tawny wedges on the native thistles, Cirsium horridulum and C. nuttallii. These proved up with big otter-brown palatkas, even bigger pumpkin-orange palmetto skippers, and Delawares as bright but half the size as the palmettos. Palamedes and palatkas supped together on one thistle, a pyle o’ palamedes on another; a third thistle had three whirlabouts, a sachem, a Delaware, and four swallowtails of two species. A southern broken-dash (rich red) and a palatka (rich gold) sat side by side on the same thistle head. Altogether, as striking an assemblage as the year had yet provided.

These tawny skippers all graze on monocots—grasses, sedges, and the like—as caterpillars, so they are diverse and abundant in native grasslands such as this. Alana spotted a palatka ovipositing onto the sedge Carex glaucescens, its hemisphere egg the same turquoise as a great southern white’s antennal clubs. Here and there Buck paused to give us looks at the lavender and white bells of pine hyacinth, actually a wild clematis, and rough green snakes whose green and yellow tails seemed convergently evolved with the tendrils of creepers. Giant cicada killer wasps with blue wings and yellow spots worked the sandy verges, and a loggerhead shrike dropped and got one before our eyes.

The Coopers called one wood lot Zebra Swallowtail Hammock, for reasons clear upon our arrival. Nearby, at Peavine and Milita roads, we found Neonympha areolatus! The Georgia satyr—a lifetime desire, satisfied. As a boy, I had been sent a specimen by a Tennessee researcher, in exchange for live hackberry butterflies I mailed for his studies. Coconut brown with coral red beads and hoops surrounding sea blue atolls with yellow shores . . . is it any wonder I’d always longed to see this rare Atlantic beauty in life? Now here were a number of them, alighting for good close-ups among the tall grasses. At lunch in a wooded campground, related Carolina satyrs skipped across the lawn.

Next came Metalmark Meadow, true to its name with lots of little metalmarks. These relatives of coppers, hairstreaks, and blues, hugely diverse in the Neotropics with just a few species in the North, draw their collective name from the metallic-looking markings many of them bear. Calephelis virginiensis, nectaring by ones and twos on fleabanes, glinted and shimmered blue like the blue-eyed grass all around. A sandy willow lane, traveled by otters and alligators when wet, now hosted a court convention of viceroys, queens, and pearl crescents on a jag, all courting, drinking, and jousting.

Bobwhites and wild turkeys—petite and moosy wild chickens—crossed the road. As we were stopped for them, Buck took a close look at Powdermilk and said: “You can’t go anywhere on those tires!” I was shocked, and a bit embarrassed, to see the steel belts showing on the rear radials. I had no idea why, as they weren’t that old.

Toward five, we drove to a short prairie with several species of Polygala, swamp milkweed, few-flowered milkwort, and the suggestively shaped queen’s delight. On Eryngium yuccifolia, an umbel with narrow, spiny leaves, a twin-spot sat beside a tawny-edged skipper. I knew Polites themistocles as the common yard skipper in Aurora, Colorado, when I was growing up, but it has grown rare around Denver under the influence of lawn chemicals. The small spectacles of the skippers were magnified by big ones. A fresh-squeezed orange sulphur nectared on frogfruit, a mating pair of overloaded palamedes barely achieved liftoff, and a monarch exercised its rightful lèse majesté in an effortless flyover. To me, it seemed a heckuva butterfly day. We’d seen forty species, sixteen new, and some splendid natural history to boot. Yet Buck and Linda agreed that, of their many monitoring visits, this was one of the worst ever. “You’ve got to see it in October,” said Buck, “when the Kissimmee is a sea of gayfeather and skippers.”

Kissimmee and the Crooked Garden were hard acts to follow, but by all accounts, Sue Arnold’s Butterfly Haven was up to it. So for St. Patrick’s Day, I donned a set of green field clothes given me by Thea, drove up past Okeechobee, and found the place. Sue Arnold, a tall blonde of boundless energy and devotion, is well known and admired among Florida butterfliers and has long been involved in wildlife rescue.

Before any butterflies, she gave me a tour of Arnold’s Wildlife Rehabilitation Center. Along with more predictable species, she had several cages of Florida panthers and other big kitties. Whether they were maltreated, abandoned, or otherwise unhoused, Sue took them in for shelter and rehabilitation and, in some cases, breeding. I was charmed to meet a caracal, with its long ear tufts, and a spotted serval, and to get to pet them. Like Sue, I’d far prefer that they were in the wild. But as a cat lover, I couldn’t resist their broad, softly furred heads and big, deep purrs as I scratched behind their ears.

Like Jim at the Crooked Garden, Sue got into this devotion through the back door. On land that supported U-pick orange groves until a 2004 hurricane laid them down, she started small and found her visitors enchanted by the butterflies. With the help of many volunteers, over four years, she expanded Butterfly Haven into a half-acre garden with some two thousand plants. Twelve sections make up the shape of a zebra longwing, the Florida state butterfly. Visitors can see its form and watch the arrivals from a raised grandstand. Nearly sixty species have responded. “In summer,” Sue said, “there can be three or four hundred at once.” We walked into that fluttering horde. “The air shimmers with heat,” she continued, “and sometimes people have thought there was an earthquake!”

There were butterflies here all right—scores rather than hundreds, but a lot: giant, black, zebra, Polydamas, and my first spicebush swallowtails; cloudless and orange-barred giant sulphurs; monarchs, queens, zebras . . . eighteen species in all. The bowered entrance supported host vines for Battus polydamas and Agraulis vanillae eggs and caterpillars, and the red cannas had been chewed up by Brazilian skipper larvae. I hated to leave, but Sue had endless work awaiting, and I had a date with a monk.

Several monks, actually. When I met Alana Edwards at the Jupiter Beach campus of Florida Atlantic University, where she works, she showed me three big monk skippers in their warm brown robes, nectaring on porterweed in her butterfly garden on campus. I’d been seeking Asbolis capucinus, around the palms its larvae consume, all week long. They were a treat to see, here in yet another garden grown out of someone’s devotion to butterflies and those who notice them, or might, if they had a chance.

The next day, Alana drove me north from Boca Raton to Blowing Rocks Nature Conservancy preserve, a sea turtle nesting place with striking limestone formations. The Blowing Rock, where the surf sprays up through eroded limestone pavements, presents a stunning and wild beach scene with blue-green water and the nearest condos far to the south. The biologist Mike Renda, manager here since 1993, explained the huge twenty-year restoration project to reclaim the place from Australian pine and Brazilian pepper. “TNC wouldn’t try such a thing now,” Mike said, “but it can be done.”

A smiling Deborah Galloway of nearby Tequesta joined us. A birder gone bad (as we call those who go over to butterflies), she discovered the Martial hairstreak here, in its northernmost known colony. We saw the uncommon beauty on Bidens as soon as we arrived. In a stiff wind, we prowled around a big stand of bay cedar (Suriana maritima), the hairstreak’s larval host as well as a first-rate nectar source. Numbers of ‘streaks, both males and females, perched on the yellow blossoms and basked out of the wind. Males streaked around and lit on overarching sea-grape leaves. Silvery gray beneath with clean white lines, a citrus patch, and long, wavy tails, night black with brilliant cerulean patches above, the Martials made for a magnificent blue sky, blue sea, blue butterfly day.

Back to Boca, then, for corned beef and cabbage and thick, rare cheeseburgers at Ellie’s Diner with Alana’s parents and husband, Rick. Her mom, Lana, had given moral support to Thea during her struggle with cancer. I’d met mother and daughter at a bird and butterfly festival at St. Petersburg, on the other coast. Coleading a field trip, I’d stepped into a fire ant nest in my sandals. The next thing I knew I’d ripped off my pants in the road and was slapping at my bare legs, to general amusement. Now I greeted Lana with a big hug and said, “It’s been a long time since I’ve seen you both with my pants on!”

In spite of that, Lana presented me with a kind contribution to the Big Year from the Atala Chapter of NABA, of which Alana was president. Back at her house, we shared wine, her dad, Dave’s splendid Key lime pie, and my inaugural episode of The Bachelor, I slept with the amazing one-eyed Skipper, a head-butting orange puss, dreaming no doubt that I had a caracal in my bed.

I awoke to Alana’s soft announcement that a lovely, fresh atala was emerging in the backyard. I sat and watched that one slip its traces and begin to dry, as two more hung from the coontie, a dozen or more pupae awaited their turn, and a red trolley of a caterpillar propelled and pooped right beside the pupal cluster. And the adult! End on, from the blue-sparkled face, you see the red skirts of the hindwing open and enfold the red bum. The eyes black globes either side of the black palpi, the eyebrows, necklace, collar, and tibial muffs blue. Backlit, the blue flecks switched on, illuminated bulblets. I watched the original emergent climb to the top of a coontie and take her maiden flight. When Alana returned, she found me looking at a cluster of seventeen empty atala eggs with their exit pores, or micropyles, punched out. “I see,” she said, “it’s the macropyle checking out the micropyles. Come on, get up—it’s time to go to Gumbo Limbo.”

A City of Boca Raton nature center, Gumbo Limbo had yet another butterfly-full garden, where a Julia longwing crowded a ruddy daggerwing, the one smooth, the other scalloped and tailed like a swallowtail. This place was devastated by hurricanes; the first time, they lost strangler figs and tall trees, next time the lower paradise trees. Yet something survives, something comes back. And the strangler figs were not all gone: the spectacular caterpillar of a daggerwing dangled on a low one. Tiny larvae of a long-tailed skipper made their tents in leaves of Clitoria, a thusly shaped blue butterfly pea, and we found an evenly spaced triplet of fresh, live statira sulphur eggs on a coin vine near a spent pupal case. These counted, and it’s a good thing, as I never saw the adult, unless maybe from a train several months later.

Back on the hammock, below the boardwalk, both fiddler crabs and giant land crabs ducked into their holes, the latter looking much like a big spider we saw rolled up in a fig leaf. I’m not sure which made the deepest impression on me—those crabs, the baby hammerhead shark in the display pool, or losing my American Idol virginity with Alana, Rick, and the one-eyed Skipper that night.