13
“Cheese Next Exit.” I guess I was in Wisconsin. Wisconsin, in November, on a butterfly hunt? As I rolled past Holsteins and stone-bottomed barns, brown oak-leaf drumlins, corn stubble, and winter weeds, I had to remind myself why I was here, and why I wasn’t completely bats.
Election Day, Tuesday, November 4, Ben had taken me to the Harlingen airport. As I was about to board the Sun Country (amazingly) nonstop flight to Minneapolis (of all places), a butterfly flashed past the terminal window—I believe it was a painted lady—my last sight of a Texas butterfly of this trip. Or of any butterfly for many days to come.
The year’s original plan had me teaching a writing workshop on the train from Winnipeg to Churchill, Manitoba. We were going to visit the polar bears, and I would look for immature butterflies on the frozen Arctic tundra. I accepted the offer because it would make a change, and it would pay some bills back home. But the whole thing was axed for lack of sign-ups. So when I received an invitation to take part in a Children & Nature Network meeting in Minnesota, I again accepted. I was an adviser to this initiative, which was inspired by Richard Louv’s book Last Child in the Woods. It seemed that a butterfly Big Year ought to include a northern component in winter, and it would get me to some states I’d otherwise have missed.
I wrote several upper midwest lepidopterists to ask their advice on seeking immature blues, coppers, checkers, skippers, and others in winter. Their comments ranged from “That RMP is one ambitious guy” to “basically a fool’s errand.” No one gave me much cause for hope. But I thought I’d have a go, anyway.
That night, Barack Obama was elected president of the United States. I joined a jubilant election party in C&NN President Cheryl Charles’s hotel room. Next day I walked around the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum in a balmy twenty degrees, looking in a lightning-split hollow tree for cloaks in the crannies, then for spring azure pupae among the osier dogwoods. After the gathering, I left Chanhassen in a rented Mazda called the Tailed Maroon, after a satyr of that description I once knew in Hong Kong. Snow spattered the windshield.
At a rest area, there was interpretation for sphagnum, the barrens, and the Karner blue butterfly, in whose pursuit I had come. Before dark, I reached the Baraboo home of Ann and Scott Swengel, the blue’s chief devouts in those parts. Scott’s spud and scallop soup led into nature chat that could have outlasted their remarkable, long-term regime of butterfly study and monitoring. Scott was a former employee of the Crane Foundation here, and Ann had been longtime keeper of the national Fourth of July Butterfly Count data. I slept in their “spare” room, full of books, journals, papers, artifacts, and now me.
Up at 7:00 A.M., we set out north, soon passing Bosshard Bogs—cranberries, just like home. Dike 17 Wildlife Area in the Black River State Forest had been assembled in the 1930s from government buyouts of poor farms, then developed by the CCC for duck habitat. Today it includes white pine barrens, wetlands, and grassland habitats for Blanding’s turtles, timber wolves, and Karner blues. For an hour we knelt, lay, and squatted on the snow-patched ground, reticulated with red British soldier lichens and a mosaic of winter leaves and grasses, examining dead lupines for Karner blue eggs. Sand grains, snow drops, fungi, and lichens all yielded false alarms. Our knees went wet, our toes cold.
The indefatigable butterfly team of the Swengels made a sweet sight, knelt over their work together. Stretching out our chilled limbs, we climbed the high, windy observation tower, from which we watched skeins of tundra swans. Timber wolf tracks as broad as my hand pressed into the sandy trail leading back to the field car. “Food for the dudes,” said Scott, and lunch appeared.
Our next attempt was a bog trot in search of bog copper eggs. Beyond North Settlement Road, we walked into the bog in Jackson County Forest from Highway 54. The going was difficult in the tussocks, vines, birches, snow, and water. I tripped on a vine and fell flat, frigid water filling my borrowed rubber boots, soaking my jeans. Dense stands of dwarf cranberry crowded tussocks in breaks in the tamarack woods, but searching them meant sprawling on knees and gloves until we got too damn cold. No copper eggs turned up, but I munched a bunch of good, crisp, tangy cranberries, so big for their tiny leaves. Then there was the beauty of the bog, its reds, greens, browns.
After warming up, we resumed the Karner blue hunt at Bauer-Brockway Barrens, a state natural area in Jackson County Forest. Right off, Scott found an egg cemented to an herbaceous stem next to a lupine. With our hand lenses, we clearly saw the flattened, dimpled, and ornamented white donut. Then Ann and I found one each laid on lupine pods, conspicuous on the dark, hairy beans. She and Scott had not attempted this before; it was fun to see something new for them, with them, in their own intimate territory.
This was a big deal for me. The Karner blue, now a cause célèbre across the Upper Midwest, was one of the Xerces Society’s first conservation projects, in the mid-seventies. The butterfly had been distinguished as its own taxon and named by Vladimir Nabokov while he was curator of butterflies at Harvard, and it later cameoed in his novel Pnin. Decades later, the society director Robert Dirig obtained a letter from Nabokov in support of Xerces’ efforts to protect the Albany Pine Bush population in New York. I’d been much involved with this animal for years, but I’d never seen it, and an egg was much better than nothing. Though it was at that time listed as a subspecies of the Melissa blue, Nabokov and Dirig both considered the Karner blue distinct, and most authorities agreed it would eventually be elevated as such. As this book goes to press, that prediction has just come true, in the first revision of Pelham’s Catalogue.
We finished our bog crawl over a meal of local cranberry brats and New Glarus Bog Ale at the Bog Restaurant, warmly glowing in its piney walls and furniture. Proprietor Charles said this was the Bog’s last night, thanks to a bankrupt lodge and a failed Flintstone theme park. I wondered if the timber wolves and Karner blues might inherit this boggy landscape after all, and so they may; but happily, the Swengels later informed me the restaurant has since reopened.
Back on Birch Street, we talked butterflies, fire, people, and other mutual passions and plaints into the night. The Swengels have done a great deal of rigorous research on the impact of intentional burning on butterfly populations. Their findings have been received with a “kill the messenger” attitude by The Nature Conservancy and others. Bluntly voicing their often iconoclastic and inconvenient beliefs, based on sound science in service to conservation, Ann and Scott inspire strong feelings. Their work is beginning to affect policy and practice. I like them a lot and hugely admire their dedication to natural history, which shames most of us, or should.
Two days later I was again on my knees, this time at the Riveredge Nature Center just west of Lake Michigan, north of Milwaukee. I’d led butterfly walks there during the warm days of summer, but this was different. Su Borkin, lepidopterist at the Milwaukee Public Museum for thirty-some years, met me for a long-planned hunt for the swamp metalmark—the species I’d so narrowly missed in Missouri. A covey of young Riveredge naturalists joined us. Out in the very field where I’d netted meadow fritillaries, Su pointed out Cirsium muticum, host plants of Calephelis muticum. She gently poked about the bases of the swamp thistles, and on the second or third one, unearthed two caterpillars plus their woolly cast skins and eggshells. One reacted to the warmth of her hand by rearing its head; the other turned its posterior up and shot poop.
This site occupied just half an acre. In her extensive site assessments for the Fish and Wildlife Service, Su found very few appropriate habitats in the state. One lies in the kettle moraine country, another along a power line right of way, then there is this site. There are maybe twelve historic colonies, but just the three active populations known in Wisconsin. So Riveredge really is a significant habitat for this state-listed species.
“Given how small the sites are,” Su told us, “you have to have some optimism that there are some more sites lurking. But from what I’ve seen, it seems unlikely.” If not for the more robust Missouri colonies(!), Calephelis muticum would likely be listed already. Intolerant of fire, the species may have suffered from burns, but succession is responsible for most local extinctions, with larch, birch, dogwood, and ninebark taking over marshes. So to manage for it, you need to reduce the biomass without crisping the critters. I was thrilled to see those larvae. It was especially, wickedly sweet to have a second chance, having come so close in Missouri. Now it remains, as for the Karner blue, to see them fly one day.
Su and I drove out Blue Goose Road to Cedarburg Bog preserve. We walked a trail over a piney drumlin she calls her Mourning Cloak Wood, then out onto cedar and tamarack bog. Ice cracked beneath bridges and scarlet pitcher plants, gin Popsicles in their mouths, poked up through rose-red sphagnum. We sprawled on the boardwalk, my plan ever since Orono Bog, and searched dwarf cranberry leaves for bog copper eggs.
We took our candidates (for there were some) back to the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, Field Station, where Su once based her research, to examine them. The director, Gretchen Meyer, had been a student of Remington and Francie Chew at Yale and gladly provided lab space and microscopes. Our “eggs” all turned out to be white fungal disks, but we had enjoyed the search. We debriefed over my life cheese curds at the DQ in Saukville. “Not the best cheese curds,” said Su. But they were cheese curds, it was Wisconsin, and it was warm.
The next day, I left the home of my Riveredge friends Barb and Don Gilmore. They’d flown to Seattle for their twenty-fifth anniversary, so I walked Spaniel Sheila at seven. Sniffing the crisp white selvage, she got excited when a duck hunter’s shotgun boomed. Sheila loves nothing like hunting with Don. I was sorry to disappoint her as we walked back, leaving our footprints on the frosty grass, but I had my own hunt to resume, and a dog wouldn’t help.
Wisconsin is easy on the eye. Dusty sumac crowded against the fencerows. On my way to Oshkosh, near Horicon Marsh, I passed Brownsville—a million miles in every way from Brownsville, Texas, where I could be right now surrounded by butterflies, inflating my stalled total. Here, the cold, clear sky was full of geese. Into Winnebago County and then, b’gosh, I was in Oshkosh, a life garment-brand location. I would have loved to have seen the yellow and purple tapestry of goldenrod and New England asters all over these fields just a month ago. The “World’s Longest String Cheese” could be seen at Weyauwega, near the Waupaca County fairgrounds.
Somewhere between Highway 10 and Rustic Road 54W, barns and silos replaced adult superstores and billboards. After Appleton, Almond, and Amherst, beyond Wild Rose, past Plover and south of Vesper, I found Ron Arnold’s inviting home on the back forty of his family farm. We visited in the warm inside, then took off for the field. In our respective rigs, we drove deep into sandy bogland of Jacob Searles Cranberry Company holdings, in the township of Cranmoor. Snow fell in small pellets, and the temperature dropped. A young white-tailed buck flashed his big white flag for Armistice Day. Snow blew along the ice in the bogside ditch. This was not Texas anymore.
In summertime, Ron had seen fifty to sixty Harris’s checkerspots at once here, an uncommon beauty I’d encountered only once ever, in Vermont. Having come now to look for its diapausing larvae, we were surprised by a flying lep—a November moth, winging its way through the falling snow. We entered the marsh and poked through flat-topped asters, Harris’s host plant, as our fingers froze. I found feeding damage and egg mass remnants, and Ron retrieved a mote of silk. I was hoping the larvae might still be present in communal nests in winter; my research and queries had yielded conflicting results on this point, but I’d located no one who professed to actually finding any.
A big flock of black-capped chickadees descended onto poison sumac’s white berries. We went until our toes and fingers froze, and then went some more, maybe two hours in all. As we left, sleety snow had collected in wide, loopy stripes on the ditch ice. Heading out, I saw a lot more aster. So when we got to the blacktop and said our goodbyes, I turned around and went back, stopping to watch hundreds of sandhill cranes glide over low, getting out before the really heavy weather closed in. I suspected their example should be heeded. But after my toes warmed up, I went out again into a deeper, reedier marsh. There I collected aster stems with leaves on until nearly dead dark.
As I tucked my big, unruly bouquet into the trunk, a withy cutter drove by, his willow switches piled in the back of his pickup. We nodded at each other, a nod without questions, winter harvesters with our different harvests. The sandy road was white and slick with snow beside the ditch. I eased on out with care, holding no desire at all to slip into that ditch, through that ice, especially after that bridge in Majestic, Kentucky.
In my room at the Antlers Motel in Eau Claire, I ransacked my bale of aster herbage, making a mess of pappi and dried leaves like roll-your-own tobacco all over the carpet. I selected and bottled up a bunch of rolled leaves to check with a dissecting scope back home. In the event, I would actually find one live larva—not Harris’s checkerspot but a casebearer, a microlepidopteran of the family Coleophoridae. These minute moths, as larvae, make houses rather like those of caddis flies from silk and bits of leaf and other materials. The end of this one suggested a three-cornered hat. From these shelters, they stick out feet first and feed.
The following spring, having hibernated in its tiny case, the caterpillar was still alive. I gave it fresh new Douglas aster (Aster subspicatus) leaves, our native, from our own dooryard. It fed at first, then went torpid for several weeks, but then began roving and apparently feeding again. At that point I wrote to Jean-François Landry, a Canadian scientist and expert on the colephorids, for his advice. He suggested misting it to mimic dew, and being patient, but also warned me that parasitism is a frequent bane.
Indeed, on the nineteenth of August, I found an even tinier wasp in the rearing chamber. A colleague of Jean-François’s in Ottawa identified it as a member of the chalcidoid genus Perilampus. From its case and host, the parasitized micromoth larva matched Coleophora bidens—but that species is known to feed only on the seeds of asters and goldenrods, not the leaves, whereas our creature made minute mines in the leaves, rolling up bits of the epidermis like tiny green cigars. This struck Jean-François as very strange. It could be a new species, as might the wasp, but he could not make a positive ID from the case alone.
I may one day have to go back and look for more. Meanwhile, my bog trot yielded a third trip lepidopteran, and two specimens for the Canadian National Collection. The remarkable thing is that, if not a Harris’s checkerspot, some mote of actual life came out of that cold dusk thrash through snowy weeds in a Wisconsin marsh. Imagine that.
The following morning, driving toward the Twin Cities, I placed my pillow fight’s-worth of winter asters in a suitable same-species spot. Then I drove to St. Paul and dropped into Garrison Keillor’s Common Good Books, a great little basement bookshop with an unusually broad wall of poetry. I bought the proprietor’s own compendium, Good Poems, for the long train trip home. At my friend’s house in Minneapolis, I sat back and read Robert Bly. When Robert Johnson returned from giving a reflexology session, he showed me his latest fine book-making project, for a collection of Bly’s poems. He prints the texts and builds the elegant bindings, and his extraordinary books reside in the rare book collections at Harvard and Yale universities. Robert asked, “Can I go to the bog with you tomorrow?”
Cedar Creek Ecosystem Science Reserve was recommended by several lepists, even those who thought I was nuts. Robert and I searched cranberry leaves on the floating bog from narrow, two-plank boardwalks. Luann and Mary from the field station visited us, and Mary, in her nice work clothes, hunted with us for an hour. Robert looked all around a deer bone that he took for an omen.
Amazed, I gazed back at them, this professional woman and this noted book artist, out here combing the winter bog for invisible bits of life, on my behalf. I wanted Robert to find eggs almost as bad as I’d wanted anything all year. He attended to one place better than I, who shifted from spot to spot as I got stiff and cold. He also bent, reached, and squatted better, though he is taller and about the same weight. When he had to leave, I was sad to see him go without any eggs in his basket.
I had one more hour, lying on the boardwalk or in soft and yielding sphagnum. I checked many a tiny leaflet and saw bits of fluff, skeletonized and nipped spots, and the tiny domes that bear the spores of Ascomycete fungi. Then, rooting one last time through my original hummock, I noticed an off-white oval mote on my finger. I got it safely back to the lab, where Mary and Luann, excited, rounded up a scope. The tiny unit proved indeed to be an egg—but not of the bog copper. It was a little eccentric, too elongated, and lacked the ornamented pillbox look of any lycaenid ovum. So the last United States copper missing from my list would remain that way.
But that was no disgrace. Later, David Wright, the only person I know who has actually found them (and one of the very few who has looked) wrote me this: “It is amazingly difficult to find epixanthe eggs.” Maybe I got all these people—Ann, Scott, Su, Ron, Robert, and Mary—out on a wild-goose chase, crawling through winter bogs in the frozen North in search of mythic motes, for nothing. But we had fun. We found the eggs of Karner blues, the wild worms of marsh metalmarks, and a cool casebearer. And we got out: that never needs an apology.
And if one could look forward as one looks back, there would have been even more to celebrate. The following July, Ann Swengel wrote to me that “the bog copper eggs we failed to find as adults are abounding as adults. On July 4th . . . we found swarms.” Scott added, “The first two Karner blues we saw this year in Bauer-Brockway Barrens were, respectively, flying circles around the lupine plant where you found an egg, and less than a meter from where Ann found an egg. The place was loaded with Karners this year.” And over at Riveredge, Su Borkin found the swamp metalmarks in good shape too, and may have seen the very ones we petted as woolly first instar larvae.
Robert made me a great grilled cheese, massaged my feet, and put me on the Empire Builder, pulling out of St. Paul at midnight. Two mornings later, chatty passengers wakened me in time to see the Columbia River, all pink in the sunrise. I washed my face and, in a stroke of magic, came out to the vestibule just in time to look right into the Fish Patch, its burdock and wintervege as red as its summer monarchs in the dawning. I took Robert’s buttered raisin bread, a banana, a little Amtrak granola, milk, and coffee into the dome car. Mt. Hood emerged around a bend, and with the moon still high, the sun erupted out of the cold magma walls, casting a yellow sun glade all down the Great River of the West. At Hood River, my two-month giant circuit was complete, for this was where I’d left the river to head south toward Texas.
And then there was Thea, meeting me in Kelso with a huge hug. We drove home through the Columbia White-tailed Deer Refuge, listening to A Prairie Home Companion, When Garrison Keillor and Andra Suchy sang “The Bramble and the Rose,” our wedding song, we stopped, got out, and danced our way right down the middle of the refuge road.