State of the Butterflies in the United States: A Roadmap for Recovery

I’m sure it’s not surprising to hear that butterflies are in decline, but the speed at which it is happening may be. Butterflies are being lost at a rate of 1.3% per year, which means more than one-fifth have disappeared over a 20-year period. These are just a couple of the alarming statistics that emerged from the work of the State of the Butterflies in the United States working group. The group was comprised of scientists from universities, agencies, and the Xerces Society. Their findings have been published in academic journals, including Science. Building on this, Xerces has just released State of the Butterflies in the United States, a report authored by members of the working group that presents a picture of the status of butterflies and offers a vision for how we can reverse the declines.

To talk with us about the report and what we need to do are Scott Black and Cheryl Shultz. Scott is the executive director of the Xerces Society. His work has resulted in the protection and restoration of habitat on millions of acres of rangelands, forests, and farmland, as well as protection for many endangered species. Cheryl is a professor at Washington State University Vancouver, where she studies the ecology of at-risk species, particularly butterflies of the PNW prairies. Cheryl also is a long-time scientific advisor to the Xerces Society. 

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Photo credit: Candace Fallon/Xerces Society

Thank you for listening! For more information go to xerces.org/bugbanter.

Transcript

Matthew: Welcome to Bug Banter with the Xerces Society where we explore the world of invertebrates and discover how to help these extraordinary animals. If you want to support our work go to xerces.org/donate.

Rachel: I'm Rachel Dunham in Missoula, Montana.

Matthew: And I'm Matthew Shepherd in Portland, Oregon.

Rachel: I’m sure it’s not surprising to our listeners to hear that butterflies are in decline, but the speed at which it is happening may be. Butterflies are being lost at a rate of 1.3% per year, which means more than one-fifth have disappeared over a 20-year period. These are just a couple of the alarming statistics that emerged from the work of the State of the Butterflies in the United States working group. The group was comprised of scientists from universities, agencies, and the Xerces Society. Their findings have been published in academic journals, including Science. Building on this, Xerces has just released State of the Butterflies in the United States, a report authored by members of the working group that presents a picture of the status of butterflies and offers a vision for how we can reverse the declines.

Rachel: Here to talk with us about the report and what we need to do are Scott Black and Cheryl Shultz. Scott is the executive director of the Xerces Society. His work has resulted in the protection and restoration of habitat on millions of acres of rangelands, forests, and farmland, as well as protection for many endangered species. Cheryl is a professor at Washington State University Vancouver, where she studies the ecology of at-risk species, particularly butterflies of the Pacific Northwest prairies. Cheryl also is a long-time scientific advisor to the Xerces Society.

Rachel: Welcome back to the podcast, Cheryl and Scott. We're super happy to have you here.

Scott: I'm happy to be here. Haha.

Cheryl: I'm delighted. Haha.

Matthew: Yeah, thank you for making the time today. So to start us off, I know that the two of you sparked this whole endeavor—you know, the working group, the academic papers, and now this report. What was your motivation behind it?

Scott: Well, the motivation was that we know across the board that wildlife are declining, right? We've known this for some time. It started with, groups looking at vertebrates—you know, mammals were declining. People started seeing amphibians were declining. Great work showed that—well, great is a funny word when we're talking about decline in these animals—but well-done work on bird declines. And Cheryl and I were at a conference where, huh, fancy enough we were doing a symposium on butterfly conservation. And we were having lunch together and I just threw out, you know, it would be really great if we could document what is going on with butterflies and the status of butterflies in the United States like they have with birds, mammals, and some of these other groups. And I just kind of threw it out there going, “Yeah, this is an awfully big topic. Not sure if we could ever get this together,” but Cheryl actually was listening and took it to heart. And we had many conversations over time about how to get this done. But Cheryl really then led that effort to make this possible.

Matthew: That's amazing. Always find it incredible how such big projects start from a short conversation. We mentioned in the introduction that there was a working group behind this, and I think it's really important that we recognize their work. I mean, who was involved with that?

Cheryl: Well—so this is Cheryl—and it really did take a large group of people to pull this all together. So, you know, we started out with this idea, but butterfly records are all kinds of records and all kinds of formats and all kinds of places. And we knew that pulling this information together was gonna take people that just had expertise in a lot of different places. The working group was initially funded as a proposal to the USGS Powell Center, which funds working groups. And then in collaboration we got U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service involved and ultimately, were able to get it funded through collaborative funding from USGS and the Center for Pollinator Conservation under U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. So an enormous thanks to those organizations that were able to fund us and bring us together as a working group. But we also had—so about 20 so of us from federal agencies—and the federal agencies were super important in this—but also nonprofits like Xerces, and academics.

Cheryl: So, myself at Washington State University, Elizabeth Crone at UC Davis, and Wayne Thogmartin were the lead researchers who put together the proposal. But also Leslie Reese at Georgetown, and Elise Zipkin, and Nick Haddad in Michigan, and many, many others. Some of the analyses were led and the lead science paper by Colin Edwards, who was a postdoc in my lab here at WSU and is now a researcher at Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife. But lots of people involved in pulling this together.

Matthew: You mentioned that the data, the information was very varied. What kind of information lies behind this analysis, and did it take a long time to gather it?

Cheryl: So the information in this analysis are all of the information of the volunteers primarily that go out and count butterflies. They go out and identify and count butterflies. So this is a compilation of all of those data sets that are the community science data sets where like with NABA—North American Butterfly Association— Fourth of July counts, and other counts where we go out and identify and count butterflies and look at all those records. So those kinds of data sets really got started in the last couple decades. And so that's the reason we only looked at changes over time in the last 20 years because 40, 50 years ago there weren't as many people out in the landscape counting and identifying butterflies. So those data sets are pulled together through those Fourth of July butterfly counts—which were originally started under Xerces and now we're under NABA. Also the, what we call Pollard-based, so community-based, state-based organizations where people go out every week and count their butterflies. And then many individual programs where people are going out and looking at rare butterfly species and saying, “How many of this species is here each week?”

Matthew: I read that it was something like 12.6 million observations from 77,000 surveys.

Cheryl: It's amazing. It is amazing. And it was quite a feat to pull all of those together. A lot of that got started under the umbrella of the work that Leslie Reese at Georgetown has done, and her group to pull together a lot of these community science-based efforts, as well as those under the Fourth of July counts under NABA.

Rachel: That's amazing. Community science is so powerful. And community scientists, we need them [and] volunteers out there doing this work. And obviously it has an impact. So let's dig into some of the analysis. What were some of the overview findings of this report?

Cheryl: So in terms of the overview findings, you've highlighted some of that already. So just this striking decline in how many butterflies we are losing. And so, I often focus on what's happening to all those individual species. So we have around 650 butterfly species in the contiguous U.S.—so all of the states and what we think of as continental U.S.—and about 340 of those—342—we had enough data to actually know: are there changes over time? That means all the rest of the species we don't even have enough data to know what's happening with their populations. Of those 342 species, then we could identify population trends, and over a third of those species have declined by more than 50% in the last 20 years.

Cheryl: That's just enormous. Like, and every time I say that, I have to stop and just think about what that means. And what that means for how many species. And it's just stunning to me, and a little frightening, that these declines are so rapid just in the recent past, and just in the last 20 years.

Scott: You know, you mentioned the implications for those species, but I wanna make sure that people understand that there are implications far beyond these species. So when you're seeing declines like this over the majority of species—. So one other way that we looked at this is that for all the butterflies you might see out on the landscape 20 years ago, you're seeing 20% less. You're seeing four where you used to see five. That's huge.

Scott: So butterflies are so important. They are important flower visitors that do pollination. They're really important in nutrient transfer. Think of the caterpillars that eat plants, and they poop, and that is readily available fertilizer for other plants. They help soils, and they're really important food for wildlife. Over 90% of songbirds need insects to feed their young, and one of their main insect sources are caterpillars, as well as adult butterflies.

Scott: So when we're seeing these declines, this doesn't mean that, “Oh we'll just see less butterflies.” We might see less pollination. We'll potentially see less fledglings in the songbirds that we love. The ramifications go on and on. So I can't express enough how important this report is to show this decline, which then we can talk about the real consequences, and as we'll get to later, what we can all do.

Rachel: So was there anything in the findings that surprised you?

Scott: I think there were some surprises, but overall the general information we found about butterfly decline did not surprise me at all. It's one of the reasons why I really thought we needed to do a status of butterflies report. And it doesn't surprise me, unfortunately, because we had already seen all these other groups. Wildlife are declining across the planet. Study after study, after study shows that. So, unfortunately, I thought we found what we would likely find. I was really hopeful that, you know, we'd all be wrong. But, unfortunately, I didn't find many surprises here. But I think there were little tidbits of surprises, so I'll go to Cheryl.

Cheryl: So I think because I tend to focus on rare species, and a lot of, until recently, have been relatively local, what we think of as endemic—so species that have limited areas—I was not fully aware how much the species we think of that are common and widespread are just disappearing from our landscape. So I just hadn't been focused on it, and I kind of knew it at the edges of things. But seeing it in the data sets, and seeing it come out species after species, even in things that we think of as common, we think of as weedy. We think of like, “Oh, those weedy butterflies.” And just how many of those species, of those common widespread species, are just disappearing before our eyes. I knew there was some, but I the extent and the scale and the rate I was not expecting for some of those species.

Scott: And that's a really good point, and goes back to this issue that I think many of us who've worked in this field for a long time, the focus has been on rare endemics. I started my butterfly work by looking—working on the Uncompahgre fritillary, which is found only in the high mountains of the San Juans of Colorado. A classic rare endemic. As climate change and overgrazing were really hitting this butterfly, we were seeing declines.

Scott: But you have things like the West Coast lady, the large marble, these species that are found throughout landscapes and were very, very common. And I think this is epitomized by the monarch butterfly, especially in the West. You know, we have seen a 99% decline in numbers, if you just look at last year's dismal count numbers on the West Coast. These are the butterflies when you think about it that are helping drive ecosystem functions, and so we should be concerned about that.

Scott: I know we're talking doom and gloom here, and we're gonna talk solutions, but I also then wanna point out the interesting thing on the other coin from these common—formerly common—widely distributed species is that many, many people can get engaged, right? Only so many people can come up—and boy, do it if you can—get up to the high mountains of the San Juans in Colorado—the best job I ever had. Not everybody can go work on that conservation of that species, but pretty much everybody can help with things like the large marble, and the monarch butterfly, and the West Coast lady, and these other widely distributed butterflies.

Rachel: Are there any specific species that we should be most concerned about? Is there a common species, or a rare species, or just all of them?

Scott: Correct me if I'm wrong, Cheryl, but what we saw in this is that, unfortunately, we're seeing declines in every butterfly family. As Cheryl mentioned, we're seeing declines in what we thought of as common butterflies, as well as the rarer butterflies. So there doesn't seem to be a thread, Cheryl, that points to specific groups. Although maybe we could look at grass skippers in the Southwest, which seemed to be very much in decline. But it's a great question. Cheryl, do you—can you add to that?

Cheryl: I—you know, I started putting together notes when Rachel and Matthew sent us questions, and I noted down that I almost can't answer this one in terms of like: which one? Because there isn't a one species, or even a one group, as you alluded to, there's not one group of species, there's not one habitat. So like the bird study, and the bird recovery efforts say, “This group is increasing now,” in terms of turning the tide for those birds, in terms of a lot of the wetland species that they've had focus on. You know, “This group's working, and that group isn't.”

Cheryl: But the butterflies, there's no particular group in the ecological sense. We looked at butterfly traits, and just said, “There are certain kinds of things that are associated with increases and decreases,” and it's all over the map in terms of which ones are declining. And there's not like one thing that we can point to that says, “This is the group that's increasing or decreasing.” And so we're concerned about butterflies across the board, whether they're rare, whether they were common and are not, whether they're in grasslands, or in other kinds of landscapes—we're seeing losses of populations.

Rachel: It's interesting when you look at different groups of animals, sometimes there are winners and clear losers when we see climate change and these other environmental impacts. What I'm hearing from you is that there are no winners with the butterflies. There are none that are really increasing. Or am I wrong? Are there a couple species that are actually doing okay, and maybe, populations are getting better?

Cheryl: There are species that are increasing, and that was some of the bright spots we do see. But we can't see patterns across large groups of species. We can't say, “This particular trait is associated with an increase or decrease.” But we do see in every region—so we did these regional analyses that I think we'll get to in a couple minutes—but in every region there are increasing species, and we do see signs of hope. And there are a lot of species that we see some increases in. And I think some of the work to do next is can we learn from those species—and we have some ideas—but what more can we learn from those species to help us think about how to recover more of these species?

Rachel: That's good to hear.

Matthew: So this report, I mean, obviously there was the analysis by the working group published in Science, but this report is different from that. And it seems like a really significant report. And you already hinted at that when you mentioned the fact that similar studies have been done on birds and so on. So this report is different from the analysis, but how is it significant?

Scott: I think it's significant because the analysis was vital, right? The analysis is showing the problem. This report is providing a roadmap for solutions to this. And when you're a conservationist, sometimes you can get a hope deficit. And we need to one, avoid that, but also, you know, I've been doing this for 30 years and I do know that there are solutions, and that's what this report's about. So this report sets the stage. Of course, we need people to understand the problems. You can't fix something without understanding the problem. My car's in the shop, they can't figure out what's wrong with it, so they can't fix it, right? We know there's an issue. We know the drivers—we can talk about in a bit—and this report provides that sort of jumping off point to have these discussions on what we can do. And that we at large, that we as federal agencies, state agencies, farmers, homeowners, you know, community scientists, researchers—everybody can get involved. And that's really the cool thing about butterfly conservation is it really levels the playing field for conservation to pretty much anybody out there.

Scott: So that to me is the major difference. The data's the same, we're presenting it in a way that I think is potentially a little more palatable, because it can get confusing. There's a lot of numbers going back and forth in some of these studies, right? And there's, as you’ve said, how many pieces of data that were pulled together, right? That boggles my mind, and I was part of the paper and the report. So we wanted to make this report digestible, but we wanted it really focused on: here's the problem, here's what's likely causing it, and now here's what we can do.

Rachel: So Cheryl, you mentioned the regional profiles earlier. This report includes seven regional profiles that provide a deeper dive into the changes occurring in those regions. What information is included in the report in these specific regions?

Cheryl: So in terms of what we have in the report, we've included, for each region, all of the species that are what we call “significantly declining” and “significantly increasing” so that you can see both the increasing species and the decreasing species. But also, we've tried to highlight a few stories in each one. So some of them—. To get a little—get to know these animals a little bit. Like what do they do? What do they eat? How do you find them? What do they look like? And some of the success stories. So where are we seeing things that we can say, “This is working here,” or, “Here's how we have some solutions”? Whether they are reintroduction programs at a zoo, or whether they're community groups that go out and are planting the plants the butterflies need, we can point to the different ways in each region that we just have positive things, positive actions happening. As Scott said, what's so exciting about this is not the focus on how dramatically things have been happening over the last 20 years in terms of some of the losses, but there's so much potential to see positive change. And the more we can speak to those solutions, the more we can engage so many different audiences in so many different ways. We can get people just experiencing and excited about the potential to see butterflies across the landscape.

Rachel: I love that the report's not a doom and gloom story. It's a story of hope, and a story of action. Which I think is really exciting, and I'm glad that's in there. Are there certain regions where you found a more significant decline, or was it fairly consistent across those seven regions?

Cheryl: So we do see differences across those regions. So those regions are connected to actually our U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service regions. And we did that because the dataset made sense in that way relative to how we could resolve the trends. And we see in the areas of the U.S. that are really hot and dry, like the Southwest, that we're just seeing really large losses—that we see steep declines, losses of species that are disappearing, and at high rates, in the Southwest, and those areas that are hot and dry. I'm in Washington, and a couple of you are in Oregon, and frankly, in other parts of the coast, or in the Pacific Northwest, we are still seeing declines here, but they are not as fast. And parts of our state are certainly hot—so, hot and dry—and parts of our state are not quite as hot and dry. And there are other reasons to think that maybe some of those declines here are not quite as steep as in other parts of the country. But you know, we—. There are differences, but we're seeing losses in lots of places. And as I said though, we are actually seeing increases in every region of the U.S.

Rachel: And do you have any sense of why some are increasing and some are decreasing?

Cheryl: So I think we can get from here into this question about drivers and overall what's going on in different places. And you know, I think the weather and climate is a [on] lot of people's minds. And the other things that are always at the very top of my radar screen are habitat loss and pesticides. All of those three things together just make an enormous impact on our butterflies. And you know, when there's no places for these butterflies to have the food they need to eat, and the places that they need to have as their homes—whether they're the trees, or the shrubs, or the grasses, or the other places that they need to make their homes throughout the year—then we don't have a place for butterflies or any of the other insects to make their homes. And we are losing those places amazingly fast—whether they are turning into, you know, getting paved over, or other things, or coated in chemicals, or getting super hot and dry—it makes it a hard to get from year to year.

Scott: When we think of habitat loss, some easy metrics here—we've got 40 million acres of bluegrass in the United States. 40 million acres of land that is probably not fit for almost any animal except your kid. And I'm not totally against bluegrass. I've got a tiny little spot where we have the trampoline, where, you know, the kids play, and now the dogs play. So bluegrass can be an important part of people's lives, but we don't need vast expanses of bluegrass. The same with cropping. We've got over a hundred million acres of corn. Most of that corn is grown for—to feed cattle, or for corn syrup. And we could do a better job of managing those landscapes. I think of habitat loss—you know, cornfield is habitat loss. But then next to the cornfield, you might have a roadside that actually has pretty good plants for butterflies, yet it gets mown three times a year. Right when the butterflies would use those host plants, right? So that's habitat loss, and that's degradation. And we have solutions to both, but we have to take those solutions.

Scott: I think the same with pesticides. You know, what are pesticides? When most people think of pesticides, they might think of herbicides, they think of Roundup, or something like that. But insecticides—which as the name suggests directly kill insects—are probably the real biggest cause of butterfly decline at present. But herbicides kill the plants—if you use herbicides broadly—that butterflies need. Even fungicides can have a, play a role, especially when mixed with the insecticides to make those insecticides more toxic. And we use a lot of pesticides.

Scott: So we've got habitat loss, degradation. We've got pesticide use. And then overarching this is climate change. And climate change is a big one, because what is climate change? Well, it makes some areas hotter and drier. It makes some areas potentially wetter. It makes some areas both wetter and drier. I had a conversation with somebody a few years ago on the East Coast who said, “How do we do conservation when at that point in the last 10 years, we've had the driest year on record, we've had two of the wettest years on records, and we've had a hurricane, and a tropical storm all in 10 years?” How do animals deal with this, right? So this makes it really, really important. So I think it's important for people to realize that there are all these things happening, and that we can make changes. And these changes are really, really meaningful.

Matthew: Yeah, totally. So, to drill down, are there particular things that people can do? Are there the same things that people can do everywhere, or in certain regions, are there things that might be more important to do?

Scott: I've talked to a good colleague of mine, Matt Forister, who was also involved in the studies, at the University of Nevada Reno. He's looked at climate change, and pesticide use with butterflies, and as he said, “We can't, on a species or particular place-level, focus on that big, giant climate change thing. But having high quality habitat that is protected from pesticides, that is diverse—so we've got a good diversity of plants—that will provide what are called nature-based climate solutions.” And the more diversity of plants you have, the more diversity of butterflies, as well as bees and other animals, the more resilience that provides to climate change. So the work we do on habitat improvement, protection, improvement, restoration. On moving away from highly toxic insecticides and other pesticides. That actually will help these animals as climate change gets worse and worse.

Scott: Because I get asked this a lot, is: “What should we do? If it's climate change, what do I do?” The work you do on the ground is truly meaningful. And then one last thing about the climate change point is if you're planting a diversity of native plants, many of these plants actually are great at capturing carbon. So I think there's general things to do. And then there are certainly specific things to do. But to just list a few of the important ones. A lot of people are interested in pollinators, and a lot of people when they plant for pollinators are thinking flowers, and they may be even thinking about planting a diversity of flowers over time. Great—that is a wonderful start. Butterflies, as well as bees, need flowering landscapes over time. Native plants are the best. But what some people forget is that, unlike bees—which are nesting in the ground, or in cavities, or bumblebees in a rodent nest—butterflies need a host plant. Pretty much exclusively, butterflies need a host plant. And so they need those flowers through the season, but they also need a plant on which to lay their eggs. And I think that isn't something that immediately comes to mind. So plant, host plants.

Scott: And how do you do that? You could probably go online and find a list of butterflies that you find in your area, and then just get a good book, like one of these regional or national books—this is Butterflies of the Pacific Northwest. You can look up those butterflies, you can find what host plant they eat, and you can figure out how to put that in your landscape.
And then pesticides. The easiest thing to do is just move away from pesticides. People are so used to having some perfectly manicured space without any weeds or anything on it. Where do butterflies normally live? Look at a little wild area close to you. Is it manicured or is it a bit messy? Does it have some wood on the ground? Maybe. Does it have plants growing in different directions? Maybe. Does it have a variety of different plants? Maybe. And so we need to think about messiness, and be leaving some messiness, and not worrying about the cosmetic look of our landscape so much. So just two things—or three things, I guess. Flowers, host plants, and pesticides would be huge.

Matthew: Yeah. I've seen the report. I've spent hours looking at it so far, and it's an excellent report. But I know part of that is the—that there's an illustration that shows how, you know, we can integrate these habitats, these, you know, the host plants, the lack of pesticides, et cetera, into all aspects of our landscape. That seems like a really important element of what this report is promoting.

Scott: I agree, I agree. And just for everybody here listening to Bug Banter, Matthew doesn't just do Bug Banter, he does many, many, many other things. So when he says he has looked at this report, he's helped edit it, he's helped format it with his staff, Sara. So he has, he probably has looked at it almost more than anybody else. We should probably just be interviewing him, because he's probably more intimately associated with the words on the page than any—.

Matthew: I can tell you if there was a hyphen missing or not, or the wrong type of dash, but the content, no, you’re the experts on that, so.

Scott: Yeah. You know, the neat thing about butterfly conservation is it can be integrated into any landscape. You take roadsides. People think like, “Roadsides? Really? Roadsides? Like what are we doing with roadsides?” We have over 10 million acres of roadsides across the U.S. And many of those roadsides are either contain already really important plants for butterflies, or they could be restored as such. And what we have found working with Departments of Transportation across the United States, and having folks as the first lines just survey the roadside. We're finding incredible resources. So sometimes you can do something that's simple—just don't mow as much, or mow in certain times of year where the butterflies aren't using those host plants. And we're seeing DOTs respond to this. It actually saves them money. If you mowed the thing three times a year in the past, but you only have to mow it once, those staff can be doing a lot of other things to help the roadsides. Farmers can put in hedgerows and they can include host plants. Our Bee Better Certified program. We realize that biodiversity is more than just bees. We're trying to incorporate habitat for butterflies, for other beneficial insects. So, yes, these can be incorporated pretty much into every landscape. And oftentimes it's really simple.

Matthew: Yeah, no, that's one of things that I've, over the years, have found so satisfying about bees, butterflies, small scale conservation, is that it is—there's a really direct sense of you can do it, and you can see the change. So there's, as you say—it's a very satisfying. I guess if people are doing this work, it seems like it's not cheap. There are gonna be costs involved. Is there a place where someone could turn to for that kind of information and support?

Scott: There's all sorts of conservation programs that are cost-share conservation programs through the Farm Bill that can offset a lot of those costs. With DOTs, there's often funding that departments of transportation can tap into to focus more on native plants. But there are ways, and grant programs for, especially working lands, that you can do this. Xerces actually understands though that there are barriers to restoration. It can be cost, it can be not understanding what plants to put in the ground, it can be not understanding how to get them established and how to manage them. And that's what we focus on through a whole variety of our programs. Even up to, in certain places, we've got our Habitat Kit program that people apply to get what are called habitat kits that include host plants, as well as a lot of other pollinator plants. And all they have to do is have the land, and be willing to do the labor to get these in the ground, and then make sure they're protected from pesticides, and managed. But we have so many resources that can help people figure out how to do this. And we have folks, if you do need feedback, need a little advice, you can reach out to Xerces through several ways to get advice on, and help on pollinator conservation, or butterfly conservation.

Scott: And last, I do wanna point out—I would show it to you. Matthew, do you have it handy? All right. We've actually got a book that's called Gardening for Butterflies. And it's actually much more than gardening for butterflies, it's really a conservation guide to multiple landscapes for what you can do—the easy steps for butterfly conservation, butterfly gardening. And that's the last thing I will say. If you do this, let your neighbors know what you're doing and why. What I have found in my neighborhood is I see really cool pollinator plants, host plants going in in my neighborhood, and it's because I've got signage on my yard and I talk to everybody about it.

Rachel: So lastly, for what folks can do, you know, we mentioned earlier, the importance of community scientists. If folks wanna get out, and they wanna count butterflies, and they wanna contribute to that data, do you have any suggestions for people for where to start, where to look, where to go, how to get involved?

Cheryl: So, you know, in terms of how to get involved, there's different levels. So Scott talked a lot about how you can locally get involved in a lot of different active efforts to restore habitat. In terms of getting to know your local butterflies, there are a lot of groups that are part of NABA—North American Butterfly Association—that they do their Fourth of July butterfly counts. There are also increasing numbers of local community science groups, as I mentioned earlier, that are really how we have this data set to begin with. So whether it is Cascade-Siskiyou Butterfly Monitoring Network, whether it's the Ohio Butterfly Monitoring Program, whether it's the Illinois Butterfly Monitoring Program, there's just an increasing number of these programs. And you can connect with those groups, and they can—. If you have just a day and you wanna go out and you wanna learn your butterflies, the NABA groups are great for getting involved, learning your neighbors, learning the areas, and getting to know others. The other groups are more, you wanna take an area, you wanna walk a certain area every week, or every couple weeks through the summer, so you get a sense of: when do my butterflies come out this year? How long are they out for? Are they out much longer into the fall, as we get warmer falls? And you wanna really get to know an area, those are amazing. When people decide to kind of adopt an area and walk around every week, every couple weeks.

Cheryl: If you can't find groups and other things, there's so many tools, increasingly, that you can just find from your phone. So you can get iNaturalist, and you can, you know, take pictures of the butterflies, upload them as “butterfly,” and somebody in your area might come on and say, “Oh, you saw a monarch.” Or, “you saw a viceroy.” Or, “you saw, you know, a cabbage white.” And they'll identify them for you, because there's this amazing community of scientists that will do that. And along those lines, you can also go on iNaturalist—I did this just last week when I was out at a field site that I hadn't been at in a while—and you can go type in “butterfly” into iNaturalist, and it will pull up all the butterflies that anybody's seen in that region. And then you can poke on the points and say, “Oh, they saw this blue butterfly, and that swallowtail, and these checker spots,” just like on the phone, and see who people have seen. It's so easy to just pull everything up in your phone and see where people are seeing things directly in iNaturalist. And the more that people contribute to that, the more that becomes a resource to see who the butterflies are.

Matthew: Thank you to both of you. We've—. This has been a really great conversation. There's so much information packed in about the report, and implications of it, and the science behind it, but also, the things that we can be doing. And I—just to wrap up—I just wanted to add that people can go to the Xerces website, and you can download the report as a PDF. So for people who want to dig into it, to explore it, to read it, enjoy it, learn from it, and use it, you can go and get a free copy as a PDF from xerces.org. And I'll hand it over to Rachel again now.

Rachel: So since you've both been on before we're gonna ask some new questions to the two of you. If you could see any bug—bug being a very loose term—in the wild—being anywhere outside of captivity—what would it be? And Scott, I'll start with you.

Scott: Okay, well. Any bug outside captivity? This would be an interesting one because I've just visited Australia. And Australia is known to have the largest earthworm in the world. And it can stretch to, I believe, three or four feet long, and you can actually hear it going under the soil, making this sucking sound as it has these tunnels. This of course was on and some nature show that I've seen. We weren't able to get down to where we might have seen that when I was in Australia, but I would find that to be a very pleasurable experience. I'm not positive everybody would, but I would.

Rachel: That would be very cool to see that. All right, Cheryl?

Cheryl: So it's an interesting question that I'm not sure I've thought about exactly. And when I first thought about, I'm like, well, there are things like the largest butterfly, which is Queen Alexandra's birdwing, which is in Papua New Guinea, which would be amazing to see. It's like got an almost foot-wide wingspan of the females. It's enormous. But I think if I had to think about what I would like to see, it's some of the butterflies that I read about, and sometimes write about. So I haven't seen all the butterflies in our report. I've written about them now and read about them, but I've never seen the Empress leilia or the gemmed satyr. And I’d love, frankly, to see some of the butterflies in our report and see them in the wild.

Matthew: Excellent response actually, Cheryl. I can see how, when you're so immersed in these things, to actually experience them. Last question for you now is: what to date has been your favorite or most memorable experience with an invertebrate?

Scott: You know, probably my most memorable experience actually happened very recently. And there may be several. Of course, hard to top going to Mexico and seeing monarchs at overwintering sites. And seeing in one grove likely, you know, back in the day before there was as much decline, you know, you could see a million, or 2 million monarchs. That's pretty, pretty cool. But I almost have to go with the bogong moth. I, again—I guess it's just because I was not—it was in Australia, and it's so wack with all the wildlife. It's so interesting, so different. But we went up to the highest peak in Australia, and we waited until dusk. And at dusk, tens of thousands—maybe hundreds of thousands, likely—from the mountain of, bogong moths emerged out of these little crevices and small caves all around us, right as the sun set. And there were so many of them that you had to keep your mouth closed or you would end up eating one. And what a neat, neat, interesting experience that was. Bogong moths, like monarchs, are migratory, so they migrate to these high mountains to oversummer. They're really an important food source for the one of the cutest animals in the world, the pygmy possum. And they used to be a very important food source for First Nations peoples who actually would migrate with them and eat them. And with—the experience was amazing—we got to do it with conservationists, and researchers, and some First Nations folks that were up there. And it may just be present in my mind, but I had never experienced anything like that before.

Matthew: That must have been an extraordinary experience.

Scott: It was really. It was.

Matthew: Yeah.

Cheryl: I, like Scott, have seen the overwintering monarchs in both Mexico and California and it is truly memorable and astounding. And one of the years there, after they crashed in the West, thinking that there were more monarchs in one tree in Mexico than all of the Western U.S. Which was like a stunning kind of juxtaposition looking at our western numbers versus the east. But when I think about this question of my like most memorable experiences, I have to say, what I really remember when I think about like sitting is just—what I like doing is just watching butterflies. Not identifying, not counting. But like at the end of a field day in the prairies, and just sitting and watching the butterflies. So I have to say, going out to some of our field sites that I've worked at for decades in the Willamette Valley—which are not far from here—and just sitting in the early evening sun, when the butterflies are just sort of settling, and they're dozens of both male and female blues, and the females are this rich, rusty brown. And seeing that we've brought these numbers up. And feeling that immense sense that the communities come together to bring these populations back up, and they're in the landscape. And there's just this feeling of watching these butterflies that there's nothing quite like that to me. And that's—I guess some of this report is about: we can do this in our neighborhoods, we can do this in our homes, we can do this in the places around us. This is really possible. And kind of having that feeling that nature isn't just out in Mexico, in these really exotic places, but it's here in our homes, and we can make this possible.

Scott: Perfect.

Rachel: Oh, Cheryl, that almost made me cry. That was so inspiring. And the picture that you paint of being in the prairie with these butterflies is really special. And yeah, Scott and Cheryl, thank you so much for joining us today. And thank you to both of you, and Matthew, and everybody else that's in the Working Group, or contributed to this report for creating it. I think that it will have just a very meaningful impact, and that story of hope will last, and hopefully inspire people to take action in their backyard and in their community. So, thank you again for coming, and thank you for your time today. We really enjoyed this.

Scott: Thank you. Thank you very much for having us.

Cheryl: Pleasure always.

Rachel: Bug Banter is brought to you by the Xerces Society, a donor-based nonprofit that is working to protect insects and other invertebrates—the life that sustains us.

Rachel: If you’re already a donor, thank you so much. If you want to support our work go to xerces.org/donate. For information about this podcast and for show notes go to xerces.org/bugbanter.