Mottled Duskywing: Butterflies are resilient

In this episode of Rarefied, we head to the savannahs and grasslands of Ontario to uncover the story of one of the province’s most endangered butterflies: the Mottled Duskywing. Despite its subtle appearance, this resilient butterfly plays a vital role in its ecosystem.

Our guest, Dr. Ryan Norris, Professor in the Department of Integrative Biology, shares his journey working with the Ontario Butterfly Species at Risk Recovery Team. He dives into the science behind reintroducing the Mottled Duskywing to its natural habitats—oak savannas and tallgrass prairies—and explains why saving even the smallest species matters.

What You'll Learn in This Episode:

• Why the Mottled Duskywing is at risk and what makes it unique.
• The challenges and successes of reintroducing endangered species to the wild.
• How conservation efforts can inspire hope for endangered species worldwide.

About Our Guest:
Dr. Ryan Norris is a Professor in the Department of Integrative Biology. His research focuses on understanding the factors that influence the abundance and distribution of wild animals, primarily birds and butterflies. In 2019, he began working with the Ontario Butterfly Species at Risk Recovery Team to reintroduce Mottled Duskywing to oak savanna and tall grass prairie habitats in southern Ontario. In addition to Mottled Duskywing, Ryan has also conducted research on Monarch butterflies for 15 years and leads two long-term bird studies, one on Canada Jays in Algonquin Provincial Park that began in 1967 and another on Savannah sparrows on Kent Island, Bay of Fundy that began in 1987. 

Transcript

Theme Song 0:00

In every stream, in every tree, a story lives, a legacy. Let's listen close, let's take a stand, to keep the wild across the land. In every stream, in every tree, a story lives, a legacy.

Meredith 0:24

Welcome. You found us. Let the adventure begin. This is Rarefied, the podcast where we are going to learn to love some of our rarest and most imperiled species. Today, we're venturing into the savannas and grasslands of Ontario to meet one of the region's most endangered butterflies, the mottled dusky wing. Now, its name might be a bit of a tongue twister, and its dark grey wings with yellow brown spots might not dazzle at first glance, but it's a story of survival that is nothing short of inspiring. To help us unravel this butterfly's journey, we'll be joined by Dr. Ryan Norris, a professor of integrative biology at the University of Guelph. Ryan's research dives into what drives the abundance and distribution of wild animals, especially birds and butterflies. Since 2019, he's been working with the Ontario Butterfly Species at Risk Recovery Team to reintroduce the mottled dusky wing to its native oak savanna and tallgrass prairie habitats in southern Ontario.

1:25

So lace up your hiking boots and join us as we explore the incredible resilience of the mottled dusky wing

Meredith 1:36

Amazing. And we're here to talk about the model dusky wing. so this butterfly is probably something that most people aren't super familiar with. So for people who haven't heard that name before, can you tell us a little bit about what is a model dusky wing?

Ryan 1:56

Sure. It's a little bit hard to describe without, without any visual aids. It's a, it's a small skipper butterfly. Most people haven't seen it. Not only because it's rare, but also because they're, they are hard to see. They're not only small, but largely In descript modeled brown gray on. And not only that, to add to the confusion, there's several dusky wing butterflies that unless you're trained very well, it would be very hard to distinguish between. So, yes, it is a small scooper butterfly. Oak, Savannah, tall grass, prairie specialist.

Meredith 2:39

Very, very cool. So, mean, definitely we're not talking about like the monarch butterfly then that's got that showy orange. Most people can see it. This is smaller than that.

Ryan 2:50

Yeah, I mean, we're working uphill with trying to conserve this species because it's that doesn't look like a monarch. It doesn't look like a morpho butterfly. It's not showy. There's, there's no color to it. No flashy color to it, but nevertheless, still an important species. And it just makes the challenge that much greater.

Meredith 3:11

And so you said it's oak savanna kind of, that's a very different habitat than I guess you think of when you think of butterflies. You think like when I think of butterflies, it's meadows and flowers and, and all that kind of thing. So can you tell me more about their habitat?

Ryan 3:27

Yeah, the butterflies have butterflies all have their host plants, and some butterfly species have a wide range of post plants. Some have very few host plants, sometimes 1 or 2 species. The dusky wing falls in the latter category. And it's host plants. There's 2 host plants, prairie red root and New Jersey tea. Those plants are found in Oak Savannah habitats, Tallgrass prairie habitats. So, native habitats open canopy. An oak Savannah habitat has got a. Because it has, does have dispersed oak trees and it has a bit more, more of a canopy than a tall grass prairie. That's largely open, but those plants occur in both of those habitats and because they occur there model dusky wing does too. It relies on the host plants for rearing. So there, the caterpillars will only feed on the host plants and females subsequently will only lay on the host plants unless they make a mistake.

Meredith 4:37

So, I've heard of New Jersey tea before me if I'm wrong, that's a fairly common plant.

Ryan 4:46

I, I mean, I wouldn't say most, most people have heard of it. But yeah, it, it can, I mean, you can grow it in your backyard. You won't get a model, modeled escuing to go along with it, but you can grow it in your backyard. We have some in our backyard, so people do use it. You can find it in nurseries native nurseries. Well, the host plant, if you have the right backyards, you can plant it. Like you've still got to have a kind of a sandy backyard. The soil's got to kind of mimic the soil in native Habitat books of an hour or tall grass prairie, and those habitats are rare. Historically, they were rare in southern Ontario, and now they're even. Less abundant. And the reasons for that are kind of, there, there's multiple reasons for it. The fire suppression you know, rules around that after European colonization, there were widespread rules about fire suppression, of course. An overabundance of white tailed deer, which a lot of people are familiar with in Southern Ontario. And that's because we got rid of their predators. We enacted, you know, all sorts of no hunting laws rightfully so, because we don't want people running around shooting deer all over the place or other things all over the place, because that can be dangerous for people. But the consequence of that, you know, partly is that overabundance of deer in many places in Southern Ontario and deer love, happen to love New Jersey Tee and Prairie Red Root. So if they have access to those habitats They will largely munch them right down. And that's what happened to places like the pinery provincial park on the shore of Lake Huron. Deer went quite a long ways in transforming the park for many years. Into something that was quite native to something that was over, overgrazed basically. Yeah. Yeah. They're they're passengers. And, uh, as the habitats became rare and the other. The other factor, of course, I did mention was development to simply development. As those habitats became even rarer in southern Ontario, of course, everything that specialized in those habitats became rare to and model dusky wing. Was eventually listed in Canada and Ontario as endangered And was last seen in the pinery in the early 19 nineties, there are still populations around in Ontario. So this is not a. Species that was completely extirpated from Canada, but there's very few populations left. Yeah, it's a good question. There, there are people that know how to find this butterfly probably while they're driving 40 kilometers, you know, on the road and can spot it. I'm not one of them. But there are people including Jessica Linton, who's is the project manager, was, is the project manager for the reintroduction or reintroduction project. And we train people too. We train field assistants undergraduate students to identify Species, but there are all sorts of other naturalists around hooked into butterfly natural history in particular, or there's really good all around naturalists that are able to identify it. Go, go to potential habitats all around Ontario and have a pretty good idea of whether bottledusky wing are present in that habitat or not. Yeah, if, as long as you. People know where there are those habitats in Ontario and, you know, word spreads and people know where they are. So, it's, it's fairly easy, I would say, with some effort, you know, to find it. Now, that being said somebody not from our team, but a naturalist by profession found another existing population in Ontario just last year. We don't know how big that population is yet, but they exist in a new spot we didn't know about.

Meredith 10:12

that's hopeful. I mean, perhaps there are some pockets left of habitat that are a little more remote, so less people go to.

Ryan 10:21

Yeah, maybe. I mean, I, I don't think there's many of them that we don't know about. So I think, you know, we're not going to accumulate one every year type of thing. I wouldn't expect that.

Meredith 10:35

And the populations that we do know about, how stable are they? Are they doing okay?

Ryan 10:43

Well, as part of this reintroduction project that we started. In 2020 we did allocate quite a significant amount of resources to monitoring a couple of existing populations that we knew of, that we, we kind of guessed were probably the two largest and since 2020, every year, we've been monitoring them. And part of that, part of the monitoring is to try to estimate population size from those, those sites. Also, we want to have, we want to keep tabs on those sites because we knew that we had, we probably were going to take females from those sites for captive rearing and then reintroduction somewhere else.

Meredith 11:28

How do you tell the difference between males and females? a butterfly that's hard to

Ryan 11:35

Yeah, it's a

Meredith 11:36

itself.

Ryan 11:37

very subtle markings, very subtle mark. It's, it's not, the first step would be. Being able to distinguish model dusky wing from the other dusky wings. And then there's some very subtle markings that would distinguish sex, but it, trust me, it can't be done.

Meredith 11:52

Okay. Okay. And then can we tell, can you tell us more about this reintroduction project that you're working on?

Ryan 11:59

Yeah. So we started it in 2020, as I said, With the goal of reintroducing Model Dusky Wing to the Pinery and another site down in Norfolk County, which is near the North Shore of Lake Erie, near Long Point, Port Rowan, and that that was our goal. And we had 5 years of support to do it and that were many part. There are many partners involved in the project. And I suppose I could be considered kind of the lead science person on the project. Jessica Linton was, is the lead manager, overall project manager, and then another key partner, although, like I said, there's many was the Cambridge Butterfly Conservatory. That took the lead in rearing the butterflies. So that, that is a a necessary step in a reintroduction. I suppose not, maybe not in all cases, some reintroductions, butterfly reintroductions are just done by moving a group of individuals and hoping that they reproduce. But we wanted to take the approach of giving them kind of a headstart in captivity and then releasing them. Into the pinery, and we chose the pinery first to do because from from just an eye test, the habitat looked very good because pinery, as I mentioned, there was an overabundance of deer problem, but they fix, they fix that Alistair McKenzie and others in the park worked really hard to restore. That habitat and the New Jersey T came back up and Perry Red Root came back up and it started to look like Oak Savannah habitat, and it would be suitable for suitable for model dusky wings. So that's where we tried first.

Meredith 13:53

How do you keep deer out? Was this a cull? Was it fencing? Because many people try to keep deer out of just backyards, and that seems to be a challenge. So how do you do that with a park or like a habitat?

Ryan 14:08

Well, the park was the park partnered with First Nations in the area, and they do a call an annual call every year. So it's not. That necessarily that they remove all of the deer there, but they're, they're at a population size a respectable population size that they don't decimate the understory of the park any longer.

Meredith 14:31

And are there complex, like the Pinery is a beautiful park, but it is a park and a pretty popular one. Is it just really well managed so that human wildlife conflict isn't an issue for the butterflies while marked trails? Like, how do we that balance?

Ryan 14:50

Well, that's a good question. I mean, there's a lot of campground. There's a lot of campsites at the pinery, of course, and. The Pioneer itself is not a big park I would say most people come there for recreational use. You know, it's got a beautiful shoreline nice campsites. So there, there is a bit of a, like, maybe a bit of attention there. There, there are pathways that largely visitors keep to and are not kind of, you know, Going off path and trudging through an oak savanna habitat which is good. And then with this small size of model dusky wing and largely cryptic, you know, don't really anticipate running into any conflicts. I mean, there are, there are collectors out there that I suppose might be. Wanna model Dusky Wing for their collection. So that would be one thing that we kind of, you know, have to contend with. I mean, we've largely tried to keep the, the current sites that we've been monitoring elsewhere in Ontario, kind of the locations under, largely under wrap for that. But of course we can't keep the reintroduction of Model de skewing at the Piney under Wrap. I mean, it's a great education. It will turn into a great educational tool in a success story. eventually a great success story of reintroduction. It is the first reintroduction of a butterfly in Ontario ever. So

Meredith 16:22

That's story. Then.

Ryan 16:24

it's a, it's a nice thing to communicate to the public. And we, we did have a documentary film crew follow us around and they did a fantastic job putting together a documentary as well.

Meredith 16:36

Yeah, you just had the 1st screenings of that last month.

Ryan 16:41

Yeah, last month we had it at, In Waterloo at the princess theater, and there will be others to depending on kind of how the film company wants to proceed with that. But we're always happy as as a team as a reintroduction team. We're always happy to contribute. Didn't show up when we can and answer questions that, you know, the audience may have. I think they did a really great job with it. And they, they followed us around basically from the beginning. So a lot of the documentary is like pre release and You know, we released these butterflies in one season, and then kind of the big weight was, will they show, will they be there the next year, the next spring? And the documentary captured that too, in a really kind of quite unexpected way. Insofar as the first person to see a Model Dusky Wing the following year, after we had reintroduced them the previous summer, was an amateur naturalist. And this amateur naturalist didn't know she had seen a Model Dusky Wing, but she uses an app called iNaturalist, which you're probably familiar with.

Meredith 18:02

Great app. Yeah,

Ryan 18:13

somebody not from our team, but somebody who, you know, basically monitors the butterfly observations that go through INAD in southern Ontario said that's a model deskie wing and knew who to contact right away. So they contacted Jessica and I happened to be with Jessica setting up camp at the pinery when this came to us and we were, our intention was to go out the next day and look for model dusky wing to see if we could find the first one. So this amateur, I mean, I think it's a great story. And. She was interviewed in the documentary too, which was nice.

Meredith 18:50

oh, that's really, really fun. And find for an early naturalist. Yeah.

Ryan 18:57

what a great advertisement for iNaturalist too. You can't get better than that.

Meredith 19:03

So maybe this is a silly question then, do model dusky wings migrate?

Ryan 19:09

No, they don't. And I think the, the dominance in the public of monarch butterflies Really makes people think of many, probably most butterflies are migratory, or a lot are most aren't, and most in, instead, most over winter in different life stages, either as a caterpillar as a pupa, or rarely. But interestingly, as adults model dusky wing overwinter is caterpillars or larva. So, they, what they do though is, well, it's kind of cute. I guess they, they take one leaf from a New Jersey tea or a prairie brood root and they sew it up at, this is as a caterpillar sewing it up. They sew it up and around them, make a little nest, like a leaf nest. Basically, they're a little burrito in there and it's, it's kind of, it's like by this time it's a dead leaf and then they just. drop to the ground and that's how they overwinter.

Meredith 20:18

and so then do they pupate in the spring or do

Ryan 20:24

Yeah,

Meredith 20:24

Okay.

Ryan 20:26

they, they, they pupate in the spring when they're ready and they close as adults and they're, they're ready to go in the spring. And they will have two generations at the They do have two generations at the pinery.

Meredith 20:43

This is a fairly short lived butterfly then,

Ryan 20:45

it depends if it depends if the if you're an individual model dusky wing that overwinters or you're one that just has, you know, you're part of the generation that just encompasses the spring. It's kind of similar. Two monarch butterflies, because the last generation of monarch butterflies in the summer is the one that overwinters in Mexico. So they tend to live nine months. Right. Whereas the other generations that are smooshed up into the spring and summer tend to only live a month or so.

Meredith 21:19

Right. That's actually like, Oh yes. Some one of them lives like eight times as long as the other,

Ryan 21:26

Yeah. Yeah.

Meredith 21:29

but they also don't have to overwinter. So maybe there's, there's definitely a trade off there.

Ryan 21:34

Yeah, yeah. And we've we've actually taken to for releases now we've taken to overwintering them in, in captivity and then releasing them in the spring. Initially. We tested out all life stages at the Pinery so we kind of made it pseudo experimental, the release, cause we, we wanted to know which life stage was the best to release that. And. The conclusion we've come to so far is that adults are are the best to release and that seemed to give us the most success as opposed to releasing caterpillars, probably because there's just so much mortality. If you release a caterpillar, you know, between the caterpillar stage and the adult stage, we weren't, we weren't getting much from that, but we tried that. And That also allows us to put together a scientific paper too, about the release and about the different life stages, which I was just doing 10 minutes ago, working on it. So,

Meredith 22:39

Science in live action.

Ryan 22:41

yeah, that's right.

Meredith 22:44

So are you hoping to do many years of release or of reintroduction or

Ryan 22:51

Yeah. So I didn't really get into the story. We first released Model Dusky Wing in 2021 into Pinery. Different sites, different life stages. We did that in 22 and 23, and so we supplemented, again, trying different life stages, and in 24, this last summer, we didn't do any releases. And so we had one site in Pinery that was particularly good. And it also happened to be, not coincidentally, the site with the most host plant. It was the largest site and it had the highest density of host plants as well. So, that site in 2024 when we came back had the highest density we had seen, and we estimated the population size to be 200 individuals. And we didn't in 2024, we didn't do any releases into the pioneery. We actually switched down to Norfolk County to do releases. So that. Population size, the highest we've, we've seen was only a result of in situ reproduction from the previous year, which was great news. The other really good news was unlike any year before we were doing the interactions in 2024, we started to see model dusky wing around campgrounds. Our crew started to see them around campgrounds. We saw them in places we'd never seen them before. Where there was New Jersey Tee, but we had never seen dusky wing before. So our interpretation of that is we kind of filled up that one site almost to carrying capacity and that kind of initiated this dispersal of males and females to other sites. And so it, it's all good news at the Pinery. We don't have plans to do any releases next year either, but we will be monitoring what's happening.

Meredith 24:58

that's a really hopeful story that there was an intervention. It seems like the intervention is working for now, and that it might get to a place where you don't need intervention at the pioneer and you have a new. Sustained population that might become a source

Ryan 25:16

Yeah. I think we're like, we're pretty proud of it. You know, there was a lot of work and the other thing I think we did pretty well, Was the I mentioned the kind of the releasing different life stages to find that out. So that was kind of combining a little bit of science with releases. And the other thing that I think we made good choice about is quite intensive monitoring. So we had crews out there every day. In the 1st, flight period in the spring and the 2nd, flight period in the summer, and we got really good estimates of population size. And that may seem kind of trivial, but there are butterfly many butterfly releases. I. Probably say most are just not monitored very closely. You know, the sites may be visited, but they're not monitored, usually not monitored the level of detail we've done it. And so that kind of allows us to, you know, say something about how population sizes changed over time. The fact that we're seeing spill over from the habitat, the main site. And stuff like that. So we hope to keep doing that. I mean, we have to seek more funding. So to keep it going.

Meredith 26:35

I mean, I was going to say, that's probably an expensive way to do the monitoring. It's much easier to send out a couple of students, maybe a couple of times a season, rather than have, you know, them there every day, but sounds like you had to, had a great payoff for it.

Ryan 26:51

Yeah, probably the reason why it's not done a lot is because it is expensive. And yeah, it takes some planning and you know, when you get funding, you usually don't, you never get it indefinitely. You usually don't get it for more than a few years. So you've got to Kind of do the whole rodeo over again and seek, seek other funding, additional funding. So, so yeah, it does, it takes some work,

Meredith 27:15

And what does the actual monitoring look like? Are we talking like bug nets in a field? I've also heard, perhaps from other people studying other taxa, that Butterfly monitoring is like kind of the sweet spot. It's during the day and nice weather. Is that right?

Ryan 27:33

I guess. So it depends that I, I mean, everybody's sweet spots different, I guess. I mean, personally, my sweet spots in the winter on snowshoes, but I, I also work on birds and thankfully one bird that does nest in the winter. Now in the. In the middle of the summer at the pinery at at one p. m. in the afternoon. It gets really hot. So but some some people love it. But the monitoring looks like what we do now at the pinery. So in the existing populations elsewhere in Ontario, we actually do a mark reciting technique where. It's quite intensive where we do a marking, do a series of marking sites like sampling sites where we mark butterflies with nail polish and then one day and then the next day we do a reciting route where we count how many marked individuals who see and we count how many unmarked individuals we see. And the marking sites are all randomized. So that's what we do at the large at the existing sites with larger populations. We tried to do this at the release site. We didn't have enough individuals to. Kind of run the models that we needed to run to estimate population size, because when you do that, you need, you know, you need a fairly good sample. So we pivoted with, and I credit one of my grad students for this, Michelle Polly, we, we pivoted to an easier sampling, really, that didn't involve marking, that's called distance sampling. And for that, we set out transects, Across whatever site we're working on, straight line transects, and we walk, those transects are walked every day and you cite butterflies along that transect within a set distance. And each time you cite a model dusky wing, you record the distance from the transect and from that, you can get a decent estimate of population size. And it doesn't involve marking because the marking parts. actually quite intensive too, right? You've got to capture the butterfly. We don't you don't really handle it. So you've got to have a technique where you're getting the mark. You've got to cool the butterfly to calm it down, then mark it, then release it. So, and we, anyways, we don't do any of that. At the pinery anymore, we do mark the released individuals. Like if if we are releasing individuals at the pinery, we will mark them before. So when we're doing the distance sampling, we know whether we're seeing a released butterfly or a butterfly that was a result of reproduction. in situ.

Meredith 30:22

Okay, it sounds like a lot of walking

Ryan 30:24

It's a lot of walking. Yeah. And it's not, it's not through easy habitat either. This is brushy very shrubby habitat. So in often the blazing heat. So You have a very good eyesight. Yeah, that's right.

Meredith 30:43

So what is your favorite thing about the model dusky wing?

Ryan 30:48

My favorite thing.

Meredith 30:50

Okay.

Ryan 30:54

seems like I love how it's just hung on. You know, it's, it's really, it's hung on to a few spots in Ontario and it seems pretty resilient. And I'm really grateful that it's, it's happy to be relocated, relocated to. And so it's a great, it's a great species, like anything, like birds, like butterflies. You know, most people know their cardinals, their chickadees, their monarch butterflies. It's another level to, you know, it's kind of amazing to, if you take some time in one of those taxa to understand the diversity of species, it's quite amazing. Like with dusky wing. Oh, there's eight different dusky wing here. And some, you know, it can be overwhelming. At the start to try to identify these things. But once you kind of get the hang of it, it can be really rewarding, but the model dusky wing. Yeah. They're they're fighters. They're quite amazing that they're still around. And yeah, I'm, I'm proud. Our group work together and, and successfully reintroduced them to places that they deserve to be in, right. Places that it looks like. They're thriving in. So they just, you know, in this case, they just needed a little assistance. The, the, the current populations are ways away. There's 700 kilometers away. So they're, they're never going to reach the binary on their own. I mean, maybe, but it would, the probability would be very low. So in this case, they needed. To be walked over there and seems like they're fine.

Meredith 32:42

Yeah, I mean, I love that, you know, you call the this butterfly resilient because I don't think maybe people think of butterflies as resilient creatures, but you're right. They've they've managed to hang on. And that's that's pretty extraordinary. then, yes, this intervention, know, they just needed to find these new habitats or old habitats that have been restored so that they could have success again.

Ryan 33:07

Yeah. And they, the other kind of, the second amazing thing about it is that the other habitat that we are reintroduced model dusky wing to down in Norfolk County, which is a nature conservancy at Canada property is, has got a different history than the pinery. At one point it was a tobacco, tobacco field. So this is a habitat that's now been restored with all sorts of native plants. And now, you know, it's restored from scratch, basically, who knows what it was before the tobacco field. It was probably forest, but it's been restored now to Oak Savannah, tall grass Prairie, and if it works, we won't know until next summer, really, if it's been successful or not, but. Now we've reintroduced a new species to you know, what you could consider as a fully restored habitat or fully created, I guess.

Meredith 34:09

That's I mean, fingers crossed. I hope that we'll be able to do a follow up at some point, or, you know, you can let us know when the next showings of butterflies on the brink is going to be, but we'll definitely follow up on on this story, but for people who are listening, who aren't part of this project and can't walk butterflies to new habitats, what can they do to help?

Ryan 34:31

Well, I mean, your backyard is always important. You know, if you do have a backyard now, like, like I said, you're not necessarily going to get an endangered species there, but, but planting any kind of native plants will help butterflies. And. Here's where doing a little research to comes in handy because you can get some pretty spectacular butterflies in your backyard. If you know what their host plants are, you know, if, and some of these host plants, you, you would never, you know, you might have a, just a wonderful looking butterfly and its host plant is like dill or something like that. So, all it does is take, take, you know, a little bit of research and you could have a spectacular. Butterfly garden and eat it, eat the host plant to afterwards just have everything.

Meredith 35:21

about the swallowtail? Because I feel like I've had swallowtail butterflies on my dill.

Ryan 35:26

Yeah, yeah, no, that's yeah. The, the swallow, the black swallowtail, I believe, yeah, is, is dill.

Meredith 35:33

And dill is one of my favorite herbs too, so it's a win win.

Ryan 35:36

There you go. So, I mean, that's I mean, if you think of how much lawn is around, you know, and if we had all, I think ecologists all dream of this. If everybody turned, turn their lawn into native native garden, then we would be making a lot of headway. And there's lots of people actually doing research about that. It's just, there's lots. There's lots of obvious obstacles. There's lots of people who want their lawns. There's lots of people who object to having tall plants, you know, in their front yard or the backyard. So I don't know if we'll ever get there, but if, you know, we can, we can recruit more and more people, it'll, it would definitely help.

Meredith 36:19

And so yeah, basically if you could wave a magical wand, then all the lawn would be, be gone and filled with native plants.

Ryan 36:27

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it would be a tremendous addition, habitat addition to Southern Ontario and Anywhere where there's lawns, it would help out all of the resident resident butterflies, but it would also help out things like monarchs that are migrating might be migrating through and you know, are nectaring on like monarchs. Although their host plant is, are milkweed species, they'll nectar on other species too, of course, to feed as adults. So that whole range of plants is important.

Meredith 37:05

You also briefly mentioned iNaturalist. Is there, if people see a butterfly, does it help if they, they take a picture and, and upload it, are there projects that they can contribute to?

Ryan 37:19

Yeah, for sure. I don't, I actually don't know if we, I don't think we have a model dust queen project. It'd be a good idea to start one at the pinery, but yeah, absolutely. And like this amateur naturalist who, who, was the first person to spot a model duskwing that successfully overwintered at the pinery, you don't have to know what species it is. You know, you can guess, or you can ask, and somebody will tell you which is just an amazing kind of collective citizen science learning opportunity because There, there are people that know their species and that you can learn from and that turns like a walk into a bit of an adventure. Right?

Meredith 38:07

Yeah, as I'm also primarily a birder, but at one point I was pretty determined to try and tackle learning my butterflies. And iNat was a great way to also, the automatic ID feature isn't perfect, but it is a pretty good way to see if you're on the right track or not. And then can always make a guess and people will correct you. And it's a very friendly community. It's not bad if you get a correction, it's just, it's just a correction and you get to learn from it.

Ryan 38:37

Yeah. Yeah. The, I think that that's, you're referring to seek, right? Is the automatic identifier, AI generated identifier and that, that I've noticed. Has been just getting better and better, not surprisingly, if it's AI and it does pretty well on butterflies. I mean, I, I find it struggles a little bit on fungi, but for birds, it's hard to hard to take a picture of a bird with your phone. But yeah, it does pretty well on butterflies and dragonflies too. And of course, plants.

Meredith 39:11

So yes, so if you're wondering what a butterfly is, dragonfly is, plant, you can always, you know, it's fun if you've got a little of pocket ID you can bring around with you.

Ryan 39:20

Yeah.

Meredith 39:21

Well, before we wrap this up, we have talked so thank you, but curious a little bit, just a little bit more about you. Like how does somebody end up in a career where they're walking butterflies from one spot to another, or, you know, getting to be part of a successful reintroduction project, that's pretty epic.

Ryan 39:42

Yeah. I, I, I don't know. It's a good question. You know, like I, I did my, all of my grad degrees my, well, my two grad degrees and the postdoc on birds. I was always a bird person. And when I got hired at university of Guelph, I was still a bird person and. One day I had a kid walk into my office and said he wanted to work on migration of green darners, which is dragonfly using stable isotopes, which is a chemical marker. And I've used, I, I had used up to that point quite a bit on birds to track bird migration. And I said, sure, let's try it. So he, he went away for a couple weeks and he came back to me and said, it's too complicated. What about monarch butterflies? And I said, okay, great. There's been some work done using stabilized dopes on monarch butterflies, but it just scratched the surface. So we started that he was doing his master. So he was only around for two years. He did do a great job. And then that just ballooned into me working on, I've been working on monarch butterflies for 15 years. And I just had kind of one project after another. I started working on migration'cause that's what I'd worked on, birds. But then it got more applied and where I worked on the effects of mowing, I've done projects on effects of pesticides, on monarchs. And so I guess that parlayed into me having discussions with other people. Part in particular Jessica Linton about,

Meredith 41:18

Okay.

Ryan 41:20

Dusky Week. No, Jessica, Jessica Linton's, my partner, my. Life partner. So when we started going out, she was blabbing on about model dusky wing every day. You know, and, and I was receptive because I'm a biologist. We could talk about this stuff over dinner or whatever. But finally I just said, you know, what do you want to do with model dusky wing? Like, what's your, what's your dream? What's your dream for Model Desk? I mean, she said, I want to reintroduce it because she had just been doing kind of like little projects, little, you know, 5, 000 here, 10, 000 there, that type of thing. And she had written the recovery strategy for the species for the government. And I said, okay, well, let's do it. Let's put together a grant where we could reintroduce model dusky wing. And she said, okay, good, let's do it. So, so it took us about a year to pull partners together, you know, put the grant together and, and we got the money for five years and. So that's how I came about. If you asked me when I started at University of Guelph, whether I'd be working on model duscu and I go, I would go, I don't even know what that is. So,

Meredith 42:26

I think that's pretty cool you know, at the beginning, like, I think that's very also a very hopeful story is that no matter where you are now, 15 years from now, back, you'll be like, wow, things have changed and I really hope that 15 years from now, we get to say that in a really positive way,

Ryan 42:45

yeah, I mean, you never know, right? Like I, I mean, that's the, that's two stories about monarchs and duscuing that worked out, but I've started projects that petered out after a month, after a year, maybe, you know, they never, I gave them a try. You know, however far they go, some of them, some of them keep going and some of them are gratifying for one or two years, and then you kind of stop. And either because you lose momentum or what have you or interest. And so the, yeah, I'm, I guess I, I started, I think it's important to, as a biologist to broaden and dabble a little bit and explore and collaborate.

Meredith 43:28

you know, that's the perfect note to end it on. Thank you so much, Brian, for chatting with me. I really enjoyed this conversation.

Ryan 43:36

Well, thanks a lot for having me.

43:38

That's it for today's journey into the world of the Model Dusky Wing. A huge thanks to Dr. Ryan Norris for sharing his experience, and for shedding light on the vital work being done to save this remarkable butterfly. And if you loved this episode, please subscribe and leave us a review. It helps Rarefied reach more people who care about our planet's rarest creatures. And don't forget to follow us on Instagram at rarefied. pod and sign up for our newsletter on our website for updates, behind the scenes content, and sneak peeks at upcoming episodes. Next time we'll be leaving the grasslands behind and jumping into some fresh water. We're going to be looking at a bony, scaly, and slimy ancient creature that could really use our help. You won't want to miss it. So until next time, get out there and explore the wild, because every species has a story, and every one of us can make a difference. Thanks for listening, and until next time, happy trails.