GWC Prior Butterfly Stories 2002 continued ( Page 4 )

The 2002 Butterfly season has started! Three species of butterflies were seen in Washtenaw County on Tuesday March 12. Martin Bialecki had a Mourning Cloak (Nymphalis antiopa) in southwest Washtenaw county just after mid-day.

About 3:30 in the afternoon, I found an Eastern Comma (Polygonia comma) and a Compton's Tortoise Shell (Nymphalis vau-album) in Dhu Varren Woods Park in Ann Arbor. The Compton's Tortoise Shell was a special find as it is an uncommon butterfly in our area. On the Greater Washtenaw County Survey it has been recorded as follows over the past four years:

1998    4 butterflies
1999    5 butterflies
2000    12 butterflies (a banner year)
2001    7 butterflies

Sightings in Ann Arbor are even more infrequent:

Marshall Park 1 butterfly 4/28/1998
Arb 1 butterfly 4/3/1999
Botanical Gardens 1 butterfly 6/19/2000

It is interesting that most of the non-Ann Arbor Compton's Tortoise Shell sightings have been associated with Beech-Maple forests that have wetlands nearby. Dhu Varren Woods is precisely this type of habitat.

[from Roger Kuhlman]

With temperatures running about 25 degrees above normal, conditions have become very nice for butterflies. Tuesday afternoon (April 16), I decided to go visit the Geology Center in the Waterloo recreation area of western Washtenaw County and see what was on the wing. Going along the trails through the Beech-Maple Woods and associated wetlands I found seven, possibly eight species of butterflies. Some of these butterflies were quite expectable like the Cabbage White, Mourning Cloak, and Eastern Comma but some were good finds like Gray Comma, Red Admiral, and Brown Elfin.

The Gray Comma sighting was the first in the history of the Greater Washtenaw County Butterfly Survey (1994-2002) in Spring of the over-wintering brood of this uncommon area butterfly. All previous sightings have occurred from mid-June to early October with the bulk of reports in July.

Brown Elfins are beautiful little mites of butterflies that have a very narrow spatial distribution in the Greater Washtenaw area. They have only been found here so far in Blueberry bogs. Such places are quite rare in Washtenaw County and are threatened with a successional disappearance. How much longer they will continue to exist is an open question and when they do go the Brown Elfin will likely disappear as well. Seeing the species for another year is a very happy event.

The Red Admiral is an interesting butterfly. It over-winters as an adult butterfly and also is capable of migrating. Most (maybe all) Red Admirals in our area are migrants from further south of us. The one I saw in the Cedar Lake campgrounds could have been migrating since it was on a northeastward flight path--the way they typically migrate.

Predicting how many Red Admirals will be seen for the full butterfly season this year is a difficult task since numbers fluctuate greatly year to year. Most likely this year's total will not come close to matching what we had in 2001 when 1850 butterflies were recorded for the survey. This local abundance reflected trends seen in most places in the East where record numbers of Red Admirals and her sister species American Painted Lady and Painted Lady were found. The size of last year's invasion has been characterized as a once in twenty year's event.
[from Roger Kuhlman]