Revival of the Fender's Blue Butterfly: A Conservation Story

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Guest Information

Cheryl Schultz is a professor at Washington State University in Vancouver, where she studies the ecology of at-risk species, particularly butterflies of the Pacific Northwest prairies. Mikki Collins works for the US Fish & Wildlife Service, and is currently the Willamette Valley recovery coordinator. 

Show Notes & Links

In this episode, we talk about the rediscovery of the Fender's blue butterfly and the work that followed. The Fender's blue was federally listed as an endangered species in the year 2000. Years of community science and research have led to understanding this butterfly and increasing its habitat. Kincaid's lupine, one of its host plants, has been an important part of its recovery. Many partners, both private and public have contributed to its success.

Episode image credit: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (CC BY 2.0 )

Transcript

Rachel: 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/give.

Matthew: Hi! I'm Matthew Shepherd in Portland, Oregon.

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

Matthew: We all love a success story, and what better tale to tell than the one about the Fender's blue? Once thought extinct, this butterfly was rediscovered 35 years ago, since when it's made a comeback, thanks to hard work by a dedicated scientists, landowners, agency staff, and many others.

Matthew: To tell the story of hope, we're joined today by two people whose longtime collaboration has been central to this success. Cheryl Schultz is a professor at Washington State University in Vancouver, where she studies the ecology of at-risk species, particularly butterflies, and Pacific Northwest prairies. Mikki Collins works for the US. Fish and Wildlife Service, and is currently the Willamette Valley Recovery Coordinator.

Matthew: Welcome Cheryl and Mikki. Thanks for joining us!

Mikki: Hi! Thanks for having us.

Cheryl: Pleasure to be here.

Rachel: So, to start us off, can you tell us where the Fender's blue butterfly is found? And is there any particular reason it’s only found in this limited area?

Mikki: Yeah, well, Fender's blue occupies prairie remnants and oak savannah habitats scattered across the Willamette Valley, in Oregon. Starting at the southern end of the range is Eugene, and it goes up to the northern end of its range at Hagg Lake. And it's further limited to only those prairie remnants that have one of its lupine host plants, one of which is Kincaid's lupine. And it's also listed on the Endangered Species Act as a threatened species.

Matthew: That seems like it has a very specific requirement there.

Mikki: Yeah. And Cheryl has spent a lot of time researching these lupine plants, and can probably tell you a whole lot about the various life stages of what they do on those plants, for sure.

Matthew: Yeah, and I know there was a time when biologists just thought this butterfly was extinct. When was it rediscovered? Can you tell us more about its like... discovery—disappearance, discovery again?

Cheryl: Sure. So I mean, these butterflies live in the places that people like to live in. It's where we like to farm. It's where we like to put our city. So they're in these Willamette Valley grasslands, which are hugely productive. And like many parts of the landscape, they're kind of the first places that people settled. This butterfly kind of disappeared from our knowledge base in the 1930s and wasn't thought to be around until—. I think of it kind of as the tale of two Pauls—there are two different Pauls in this story. There's Paul Hammond and Paul Severns.

Cheryl: Paul Hammond, by the time we get to the late 80s is already a lepidopterist who is part of the community in the Willamette Valley around Oregon State University, which is where Corvallis is. And about the same time, a boy at the time—he's now an adult, of course—Paul Severns was 10 or 12 years old and was up in the foothills of the Coburg Ridge, which is outside of Eugene. So a little bit south of there on the east side of the Willamette Valley, and was up in the foothills and found a bunch of little blue butterflies. 

Cheryl: Of course, Paul didn't think—the Paul that was Paul Severns—didn't think anything special about it. Paul Hammond thought, “Whoa! I haven't seen these in a long time, and I've been looking for them.” But both of them found them in the late 80s. And people were surprised that these butterflies were still around. So, it's a butterfly that we thought was extinct for 40 or 50 years. And then we found out that they're, in fact, still around. Although, in the late 80s when that was discovered, they were really, really few and far between. 

Cheryl: Estimates from the early 90s, when I first started working, was that we had less than 1% of the Willamette Valley prairies left. And so very, very little prairie, and very little places that these butterflies might be. And so that started all kinds of excitement about re-finding these butterflies and re-finding plants that we kind of didn't remember were there, I suppose. So.

Matthew: Yeah, you mentioned that the Willamette Valley is so heavily—I mean, it's intensively agriculture, a lot of development. The butterflies found on some of the edges of the valley—presumably, it was also somewhere else. So it just had, you know—was it around the edges of farms, on roadsides, you know, surviving anywhere else? Or was it out on the edges, and then has gradually come back in?

Mikki: You know, I think one of those is that lot of the lands were heavily grazed for livestock, and the Kincaid’s lupine is toxic to most livestock species. So I think some of that was: they ate a lot of the other prairie species, the grasses and the forbs, but the lupine host plants themselves had often been left ungrazed. And so I think several of the patches that were rediscovered as we started surveying and looking more for the species, especially after listing, were found on these ungrazed lupine patches in and around pasture land, for sure. One piece of that.

Matthew: Yeah. And I'm sorry, I'm just thinking about the lupine. You're saying the livestock wouldn't eat the lupine? 

Mikki: No. 

Matthew: Was it toxic? I mean, it seems like that's the kind of plant that often then gets weeded out by the farmers, you know?

Mikki: Yeah, no. Well, often farmers, now that they realize that it is toxic, a lot of farmers will try to spray it out. But naturally, no, the livestock knew to avoid it. And they just didn't eat it. So I think we have—.

Matthew: Oh, wow. 

Mikki: Yeah, we've had several pastures with llamas, horses, cattle, all kinds of livestock species that avoid eating the actual lupine plant. So. Anyway. Yeah, that is interesting. I think that's one piece of it.

Matthew: Yeah, definitely. And so presumably, I mean, grazing prairies, oak savannah—those are all the kind of key habitats for this butterfly?

Mikki: Yeah, I mean, it's been a tricky balance with Fender’s specifically. We know that it's definitely beneficial when we raise lupine pastures—you know, land. But Fender’s has seemingly not persisted in great numbers in those pasture lands. 

Matthew: Sure. 

Mikki: But I think often if there's adequate nectar and other habitats surrounding those pastures, they do a lot better in those situations. So I don't know. I do think the other thing is—and I don't know, Cheryl, correct me if she thinks differently—but I think Fender’s is unlike others species in that it can seemingly persist in fairly small patches, at least for relatively longer periods of time than other species. So I think that might have also helped some of these small and fragmented patches persist over time when other species may have winked out in those same situations.

Cheryl: That part, I think, is not necessarily unique to Fender’s. I think we are finding more and more that if you have enough small patches that are kind of dotted around the area—. And I think a lot of our conservation activities going forward are going to be thinking about: how do we use small patches and connect them together so that we can make use of roadside areas and people's gardens and schoolyards and cemeteries. And I mean, certainly a lot of the persistent patches of prairies that I know of are in cemeteries. And historically, we think of that certainly in the Midwest as well as you know, prairies in Illinois—that there were cemeteries there, plants that are left there. I think butterflies are gonna surprise us in their ability to be resilient. And I think that's a good thing.

Matthew: Haha. 

Cheryl: You know, I think also with Fender’s blue, my knowledge—I mean, when I was in grad school I would drive around the Willamette Valley and way before GPS and cell service, and, you know, old style maps, right? And I would just put my car on north, because I could tell where the mountains were on the east and on the west, and I could tell the sunrise, and I could just drive. And you kind of—there's all those hills and valleys and other things that we would just discover pockets of little bits of prairie that got forgotten because they just were forgotten in little pockets and it's not, you know, broad, open, flat farmland. 

Cheryl: And so I think there's a lot of those pockets. Especially when I think of the western part of the valley around Corvallis and Salem, and into those beautiful valleys that all have lots of vineyards, that there are just lots of pockets of places that people weren't in, and that things could persist in ways that we just—you know, we weren't around there. So, I think that gives me a lot of hope as well. 

Cheryl: Another cool thing about these plants which we've discovered, as far as these plants, is they’re long-lived perennials. They keep their roots underground. And so, you know, you can think of perennials, in general, a lot of our wild flowers—you know, they can be burned or mowed at the top level, and then the roots are still underground. They come up the next year. 

Cheryl: But when we went into some of these prairies, when I was working in them, we would take the Doug firs off the properties and up comes lupines. And so those lupines can stay in the ground, senescent, just like hanging out for what seems like decades. And then we take the trees off that have come in the absence of wildfire—Doug firs would come into a lot of these places—and we took the trees off, and there's still lupines there which is like really cool, and to me really amazing that these plants are there. But it gives me hope that sometimes we can reset things in ways that we don't expect.

Rachel: So a lot of research—years of research—aided in understanding the Fender's blue butterfly and how to create the conditions it needs. And Cheryl, you played a huge role in this work, and you've told us a little bit about that already. But can you tell us a little bit more, and maybe what you did? How long did it take? And I have this nagging question that I think we should have asked at the beginning. But what is it about the Kincaid's lupine, like what part of—like, what role does that play with the Fender’s blue? Why does the Fender’s blue need this specific, special lupine?

Cheryl: Yeah, well, so lots of different things. So, many, many butterflies—and you've talked about this with others on your show before, whether it's Kevin talking about butterflies in the West, or other things like that—have these specialized relationships with host plants. So, different host plants, different butterflies have these special relationships. And oftentimes, the butterflies have particular chemicals in those—there are chemicals in the plants that the butterflies have evolved the ability to deal with and break down. So in terms of grazing, which Mikki was just talking about, lupines have alkaloids that are in them that make it so that the butterflies can eat them, but the grazing animals can't.

Cheryl: People will know monarchs. Monarchs have cardenolides—well, the plants they eat, the milkweeds have their cardenolides—and those get eaten and kept in the monarchs, which is why the predators, especially mammalian predators, can't eat them. Checkerspots have their own group of chemicals called the iridoid glycosides. So the special relationships that different groups of butterflies have developed the ability to eat and make use of. And so that gives a specialized relationship, which is why you get these butterfly-host-plant relationships.

Cheryl: In terms of Fender's blue and this particular lupine—‘cause there's lots and lots of lupines in the Willamette Valley—we think it's got to do with them being these really long-lived host plants. So they—like I said, they stick around a long time, year after year. And if you're a butterfly that lays its egg, and you get to the first couple of instars in the late summer—and July-ish is late summer for Fender's blue—and they diapause there.

Cheryl: When you come up in the spring you need to have something to eat, and you're not very big. And so, if you're on a long-lived plant, you'll be in a place that you have something to eat when you come out of your diapause, which is kind of like hibernation for the butterflies. So having—being a perennial long-lived lupine, means that it's in the same place next year when it comes out. And that's certainly one of the reasons we think it's helpful to be on a long-lived plant, if you're a butterfly that needs to be where your plant is when you come out the following spring.

Cheryl: There's lots of things that we've done with Fender's blue! Haha. And so, kind of a question sometimes of kind of how we got into working with Fender’s blue is—when I first started working with Fender’s blue, and this is the early 90s, there was lots and lots of questions about how to put parks together. And how do you put parks together in a way that's gonna work for the species you care about? And lots and lots and lots of interest in corridors. This is an age when there's lots of stuff in the sort of general literature where people were talking about: let's connect parks together with corridors. 

Cheryl: And I was interested in: could we actually make this make sense for a species that we might be interested in? And so I started working with Fender's blue as a way to ask: could we actually connect what were, at that point, postage-stamp prairies with this long linear stream bank, essentially? It was the banks of the diversion channels that go out to Fern Ridge, which is, I think, where Mikki's picture is. Haha. Some of those postage-stamp prairies that I worked in years ago. 

Cheryl: But the question is: could we connect them together with corridors? And so we literally watched butterflies. We would watch them fly around in the landscape. And we would get information about what their flight behavior is relative to if you're where those Kincaid's lupine are at the boundaries of the patches versus in places between them. And that told us what their behavior was in terms of how they move across the landscape. And we could use that information to understand things like: how big do the patches of habitat need to be? How close together should we put them? Whether—what kinds of what we call rules of thumb would be helpful to put together a landscape in what we often call the human-dominated landscape, right? 

Cheryl: We weren't going to be able to turn this all into a natural area. But how much do we need to do to have this make sense, from the perspective of the butterfly, to actually persist in the landscape? And so a lot of our work was associated with: how do we get these populations to increase from a few dozen butterflies to hundreds of butterflies or thousands of butterflies? Given the fact that we're gonna live here, we're gonna have our cities here, but we can also have butterflies here.

Rachel: Sounds like a Disney movie. Haha! Just watching butterflies. But no, that sounds amazing. That work is so interesting. Thank you for describing it.

Matthew: Yeah. The Fender’s blue—before we mentioned, when we discovered the butterfly there weren't many of them, facing troubles, and that led to it being protected under the Endangered Species act. I think it was the year 2000 when it was listed. And I think that was also the time when Kincaid's lupine was also added, when the butterfly was officially recognized as endangered. I mean, could you tell us a little bit about what the reasons were? Where there any particular threats facing it that led to it being protected?

Mikki: Well, we touched on some of them. It was largely the loss of habitat, as Cheryl mentioned. We were down to 1% of the historic pre-settlement distribution of prairies that had been historically, vastly—you know, expanses all along Western Oregon and Southwestern Washington. And then with the urban and agricultural development, many of the patches that were there were in a highly fragmented landscape now and isolated from one another. And then the fire suppression, that Cheryl touched on further, exasperated that. And those that were maybe persisting were being—were succeeding to forests because they weren't getting that fire disturbance that they had historically had. So.

Mikki: And, as you touched on, the numbers had dropped considerably. So I think it was a little numbers, habitat fragmentation, and yeah—the fire suppression definitely was a contributor to the declines that we were seeing. And so—and yes, it was Fender’s blue, Kincaid's lupine, and the Willamette daisy, all prairie-dependent species that were listed concurrently in that same 2000 package. So yeah, it was all three suffering from the same fate, if you will. Haha. Yeah.

Matthew: It's funny to hear you talking about fire suppression as a problem, because these days it's like—haha. 

Mikki: I know! Haha. 

Matthew: It's like, "Today we're gonna hit a hundred degrees here, and then we're gonna be locked under smoke later," you know. And we're like, "Ugh." 

Mikki: Yeah! 

Matthew: And yet fire is such an important part of the landscapes maintaining these areas.

Matthew: I know, again with listing and the Endangered Species Act—we all know there's a lot of people who don't like the Endangered Species Act, and are looking to modify it or don't want something to be listed or protected under it, because they fear that there's going to be restrictions and things they can't do. But also a listing under the ESA does bring so many benefits, resources, and other things to help.

Matthew: Do you think—I mean, how do you think the listing, in this case, helped the Fender's blue? Because now we're talking about it being downlisted because the recovery has been so strong.

Matthew:  I realize that we didn't—at no other point so far have we mentioned that in this podcast. And the reason why we're talking about Fender’s blue, and it is such an inspiring and hopeful story is because all of this work has been done, and now there's so many of them that—or not so many, but enough of them to be considered less threatened. You know, going from endangered to threatened and becoming more and more secure and closer to true recovery. But presumably the ESA listing has been helpful in achieving this really positive outcome.

Mikki: Yeah, I think a big part of that was just awareness. You know the Willamette Valley is almost entirely privately owned and so there wasn't even a lot of access to survey for the species. And so it's true that typically once a species is listed, it is ranked higher for the very limited pots of funding that are available for acquisition, restoration, research, those things. 

Mikki: And so, prior to the listing, there hadn't really been a lot of survey work even done. So, there were funds available to coordinate with all these private landowners and get out and do a more systematic survey of what looked like might be promising remnants nearby, to some of the extant, more visible populations along the roads that were known at the time of listing. 

Mikki: And there are a few new populations discovered that were much more substantial than some of the ones we knew at listing anyway, compared to these little roadside pockets. And you have this extensive network of partners that were able to work together to acquire, and protect, to restore, and manage, and expand some of those prairies, all utilizing grant funds that had previously not been available before the listing of the species. So that definitely did benefit. 

Mikki: But I also think then—word of mouth, you know. One of the things I loved working with Fender's blue for is that private landowners—there are many private landowners in the Willamette Valley that really wanted to have these butterflies on their property. Like, they wanted to create habitat and attract butterflies to their parcels. And you know there were others that were certainly concerned and worried about restrictions. "Oh, if my neighbor is attracting butterflies, will that penalize me in the future?"

Mikki: And so we worked very closely, out of my office, with our partners in the Fish and Wildlife program. There are private lands biologists. They work exclusively—they’re stationed out of our National Wildlife Refuge complexes in the Willamette Valley, but they work exclusively on private land, on voluntary conservation, and we worked with them to help develop regulatory tools like safe harbor agreements, which provided regulatory assurances to landowners that if they had no butterflies when they started doing conservation, they could return to no butterflies into the future that they had a permit to do that. And to this day, we have many landowners still enrolled in that program. No one's ever going back to a zero base line, and they love having their butterflies.

Mikki: And I think one of our greatest limitations is having enough Kincaid's lupine seed available to provide to some of these landowners. Like it really is an exciting story. And I—that human element, I can't say enough about how, in this location and geography, it's been really exciting to work with folks to create new habitat patches and connect. Sometimes it's a really important place to connect to otherwise unconnected populations. So it's been really rewarding and successful. And I think about—a bunch of it was just the word of mouth. Like once it became listed, it became more known, too. So it wasn't just the funding sources, but—.

Matthew: Yeah. No, it's great to hear how it's like everybody wants to join in by the sound of it. It's like, you want to have this rare and protected species on your land. I mean that's almost mind-blowing, isn't it? Haha. 

Mikki: Yeah, haha. Well, it seems fair. Most things that are rare are highly valued. Right? So, haha, anyway.

Matthew: Yeah, no, that's great.

Rachel: That's not always the case for every endangered species. So that's really good to hear. Haha. 

Rachel: So, one of the things that were developed because of the listing was a recovery plan and critical habitat for the Fender's blue. And Mikki, you were instrumental in identifying those areas of critical habitat. How did you go about doing that?

Mikki: Oh, gosh! That was—I was brand new to the state. I just moved here. And I had never worked with butterflies before when I became the lead for Fender’s blue. And my office was under a court order deadline to designate this critical habitat. So we had not a whole lot of time to do it in. And my office botanist left. So I was assigned to designate the critical habitat for all three species—Kincaid’s lupine, Fender’s blue, and Willamette daisy. So, I had a lot to learn, and very quickly. And we were under guidance that we could only include sites that were occupied by the species. 

Mikki: And our occupancy data was really old. I mean, this was a long time ago. We didn't have—we had paper maps with circles on them. And, as Cheryl was mentioning, there weren't GPSs. I was brand new to the state, so I had a lot to learn. I had to do it very quickly. So I first started by enlisting help from those partners, the Fish and Wildlife biologists that I mentioned that we're stationed out of the refuge, who had a lot more knowledge of the prairies, the landscape, the landowners. And they helped me go out and we literally ground-truthed all of the historic data. 

Mikki: So we drove all around the Willamette Valley, looking at all these patches—kind of like Cheryl described—finding pockets, seeing if they were still there. We learned a ton about where things have become extirpated, what the threats were with the remaining sites that were still extant, and it really helped us clean up the data and get that piece ready for it. 

Mikki: And then I started working very closely with Cheryl actually, to learn a lot more about this butterfly, based on all the research she had conducted. Her—butterfly movement distance—so she could help me define what is an occupied patch. And in that, how much prairie habitat around it would be needed to support a viable persisting population into the future? And she talked a little bit about her corridors versus stepping stones—I don't know if she used the word stepping stone—study there. But it was it was a complex study. And I spent a lot of time trying to understand the use of these stepping stones, and where they'd be best placed so we could connect occupied patches to create a viable network in the long run. 

Mikki: So anyway, all of that research went into the final foundation of that final critical habitat rule. And then, I just had learned so much from the experience that it really did set us into—me personally—up for a great moving forward into working towards recovery of the species. We had prioritized geographic areas where we could focus on for future survey work, based on the ground-truthing data. And we knew better how to connect patches that were still extant out there. 

Mikki: And so, anyway, the knowledge I gained through it—while it was an intense couple of years for me to get that done haha—it was really beneficial to helping springboard us into being prepared to start trying to recover this species moving forward. 

Matthew: I know we've touched on this—about how the Willamette Valley is such an important agricultural area. And you've also talked about already—you've mentioned how—the enthusiasm the landowners have for this butterfly. And it seems like their work, you know, and their contributions have been really, really important for the recovery and survival of this butterfly. 

Matthew: I mean, I'm just wondering, are there any specific examples of projects that have been done by landowners? And I partly ask this question because I would hope that other people listening to Bug Banter would be like, "Oh, maybe we could do that!" You know, we always kinda hope that we can leave people inspired to want to take more steps to help insects and to help wildlife. So, I was wondering, you know—just examples, you know.

Mikki: Yeah. There have been a few vineyards that were strategically located between populations of butterflies that had some remnant lupine populations on their parcels. And they've actively restored more prairie community to enhance the nectar and other plant resources there, and have attracted butterflies through their property, and are now serving as those stepping stones that Cheryl’s research had shown needed to connect populations. 

Mikki: And, as I mentioned, the grazing. Several of these ranchers have created prairie patches outside of the grazed area to help bolster—and including Kincaid’s lupine in those out of the grazed areas—to help support the populations that were persisting in the grazed lands. And you know, Cheryl could tell you a lot about the one landowner that we worked with together, where we learned some about the lupine coming back after removing 20-year-old trees on it. That private land owner was a really great partner, and still is today. And we learned quite a bit about the species off of that property, for sure.

Cheryl: Yeah, these are projects that we've done collaboratively together. And, you know, one of the things that continues to make Fender’s blue such a fun study system to be working in is there's so much energy of the private landowners, of the agencies, of the local organizations, of the people in the area. And there's just—it's really fun to see all that kind of positive cycling forward—that people are super engaged. 

Cheryl: So my initial work was done mostly on Nature Conservancy and federal land. But then the later projects around like what Mikki was talking about in the mid-2000s were all in this private land, that some of it's now in Land Trust. But a lot of it, you know, people are like, "Yeah, come work here. We've got butterflies here, and we're happy to have you come and bring your team of undergrads and go chase butterflies and learn about what they do when they get—." Well, that one was looking at what they do when they get close to woodlands, and how they travel in and around woods which are around those parts of the valley. And they were super engaged and super helpful. They would go out and say, "Well, we saw it here. What about there? And we saw here. And what about there?"

Cheryl: And we always get emails in the spring, because this butterfly looks very, very similar to another very common butterfly, called the silvery blue. And the picture that Mikki's got behind her is a really good picture of Fender's blue. You can tell it's a Fender's blue. But a lot of times, if it's from a distance, and it's not in the hand, especially if the wings are open and you can just see the blue of the wings, you can't tell whether it's a Fender's blue or silvery blue. So we'll go off and get emails. "Did I see it? Did I not see it?" And actually I can't tell if you can only see the blue of the wings. 

Cheryl: But, yeah, we've worked a lot with private landowners in different places, or even adjacent to the public areas. So up in—there's a National Wildlife Refuge outside of Salem, that there are private landowners that have vineyards and other properties right adjacent to them that have been super, super good partners in this process.

Matthew: And I was just wondering as well, I mean, we've talked about vineyards and others restoring. How did you figure out the best way to do restoration? Was there also research in trying to answer those questions, too?

Cheryl: Lots and lots and lots. 

Matthew: Haha. 

Cheryl: It's a trial and error process. So my PhD advisor used to laugh, because he said I did two PhD theses instead of one. But that was because I started on all this work with Fender’s blue and my second or third year into this as a very green graduate student, I started talking with somebody from the BLM whose name was Jack Bell at the time, and I'm like, "We don't know anything about restoring this." And he said, "Well, I've got this land, and we're gonna do this stuff and you wanna try it?" And before I knew it, I like sent him two different mini proposals that I hadn't put a lot of time into, because he needed it like the next day. 

Cheryl: And he called me back a couple of days later. And he said, "Well, we funded the bigger one." I'm like, "Oh, ummm okay!" So here we are and here we are doing this. Haha. And we started restoration efforts that fall. No, the following spring. We said—it was fall—we started the following spring to look at experimental restoration, to figure out: how do you take these old fields and turn them back into fields that support Fender’s blue habitat? And we started small. And that's, I think, one of the important lessons. And I think about that a lot right now, because I've been doing a lot of work increasingly on monarchs where I see people wanting to like start at a really big scale, as if we can know how to do things across multiple states.

Cheryl: And one of the things that was really important with Fender’s blue is we started small and we built on it. So, we said, we're gonna take this little piece. And we're gonna get this building block. And then we're gonna do the next step. And then we're gonna do the next step. And we did that successfully, because we were able to invest our imagining into the science of: how do we figure out how to do it, and then build the next steps? And together that got us to the point where we are today, where we have this great success. 

Cheryl: But it wasn't like we did that overnight. So like these experiments in the 90s. I had these little patches that were like—I don't know—five feet by five feet that were embedded in bigger areas in a landscape that was about the size of a football field but have, you know, 30 or so small patches. In fact, they flew an aerial photo—which at that point was a really big deal, because it was the 90s. I'm like, "I can see my experiment from an aerial photo from space!" which seemed really big at the time, right? Because you could see the effect of the treatments in this aerial photo. And that site, which is a part of the Nature Conservancy site, didn't have butterflies, then had a couple hundred butterflies, then had like—it took a while for them to seed it and get it going.

Cheryl: So we started it in the 90s as experimental work. They expanded the restoration work in the early 2000s. We started sampling them, and we actually—ha, my students. We counted every egg on every plant for several years, sampling every single Kincaid's lupine leaf.

Matthew: Haha. 

Cheryl: Like, you can look under the leaves and see the eggs. And we could see it increase over time from like dozens of eggs, to hundreds of eggs, to thousands of eggs. And now that site supports 800, 1,000 butterflies. And I think the numbers I saw from—the biologist who's now doing this is Kelsey King—and looks like the numbers from that site this year were in the couple thousands. So it's super exciting but it takes a commitment to, "I'm gonna figure out the building blocks of the science and be committed to getting those steps." And so we're seeing great successes.

Matthew: It sounds like all that work is really coming to fruition now, because you can go to the grazier, the vineyard, the blueberry grove, whoever, and say, "This is how you do it. This is what you do. And it works."

Matthew: I know we've talked about habitat and the lupine and the butterfly and all the figures and that, but this habitat, the restoration has much, much wider benefits, doesn't it? To other species of wildlife. And, I mean, these days, we’re all grappling kind of with climate change. And how do we address some of those? So, it seems like this habitat has much, much broader benefits than just for the butterfly.

Mikki: Yes, certainly. Lots of prairie plant species and species that are listed and species of concern. I always thought Fender's, in this ecosystem, when I first started, was kind of the keystone species that yes—once they started restoring for Fender’s and Kincaid's lupine, we could also introduce Willamette daisy, or some of the other you know, associated species. And even start to preclude the need to list other rare, not listed, but very rare plant species for certain—and butterflies, too—I mean, you know, other insects—and creating habitat that supports the pollinators that all the plants and the ecosystem needs. So, it's been—yeah, it's definitely benefited a broad spectrum of species, even just focusing initially on: how do we fix habitat for Fender’s blue?

Cheryl: I think there's another piece that's important there as well. And that is, you know, people like to talk about climate change and habitat as if these are totally different things. And in a sense, right, climate is different than habitat. But as my colleague, Elizabeth Crome, likes to point out, these are linked in terms of how we think about them. So, if a species has lots and lots of habitat, it can buffer the swings of extreme climate because it's got a lot of places that it can be. And the more we have big patches of habitat, we have the ability to buffer those effects of climate. 

Cheryl: If you have tiny little postage stamps, or you have completely homogeneous habitat, or habitat that's the same everywhere, and little tiny bits, and not very much—then you lose your ability to buffer any of these effects of the extreme. So, if, you know—like many things—if you don't have very much left, then you have to have the best of the best to have high quality and make it. But if you can have a big patch of prairie and it's a big area—the more habitat we have, you can buffer it a lot better and it moderates the effects of extremes. So, I think of these as very linked, because our ability to withstand a changing climate really relies on having more and more habitat available for the species that need it.

Matthew: Definitely. Yeah. And I think, particularly in an area like Willamette Valley, where it's just such a mixed landscape. I mean, we don't have hundreds of acres of one—I mean, maybe some of the wildlife refuges are fairly big. And we certainly have hundreds of acres of ryegrass, right? Haha. But in an area like this, where the land use is so mixed, it seems like the more habitat we can build, the better chance that the butterfly and all the other wildlife have to survive.

Rachel: I think throughout this conversation I've been thinking back to one of our first podcasts with Sarina Jepsen—she's the director of our endangered species program—I know you both know her. And talking about: what does it mean to be endangered? What does it mean to be listed? All these different things. And this story really kind of hits home the importance of species being federally listed, and the power that comes behind that. 

Rachel: And I think my mind just goes to this question of like: if it wasn't listed, where would we be today with the Fender's? Would it be recovering in the way that it is? 'Cause, I think it's such a powerful legislation, and it just is so important, and I think the public—it's just good for them to know like, "Hey, it works." Haha. Look at the amazing work you've both done to make this butterfly come back. And to think that it might be downlisted—not delisted, but downlisted—is really inspiring and the work you've both done is wonderful. So, yeah.

Rachel: I grew up outside of Portland, Oregon, and I haven't been to the Willamette Valley for a while, but now I'm like, "Man, I've got to make a trip out there and find some Fender’s blues." Haha. It'll be even more special now, after having this conversation with both of you.

Rachel: So we're going to end on one of my favorite questions, just to get to know you a little bit more. But what inspired you both to get into this work—with butterflies, with invertebrates? And what do you love—what have you loved most about working with the Fender’s blue butterfly?

Cheryl: You wanna start Mikki?

Mikki: Sure. Well, I had—like I said, I had never worked with butterflies before. And I had worked—I had just come to Oregon and prior to—and after starting my career with the Fish and Wildlife Service, I had been given an opportunity to get a broad experience, starting in California with California gnatcatchers and arroyo toads. And then I came to Oregon, I was working on Columbian white-tailed deer. And I was working on Washington ground squirrels. And I—while I was gaining a ton of information about the ESA and all these different ecosystems and habitats—I was really looking forward to having just a focused geographic area. 

Mikki: And so when I was—I was thrilled to be given the Fender’s blue, and to be able to work in the Willamette Valley. And I stayed in that role for 15 years because I loved, as I mentioned, all these private land owners and the enthusiasm of those private land owners, but also the extensive amount of collaboration and partnerships and the networking. I can't—we could do a whole Bug Banter episode on just the extensive partnerships, and it is really satisfying. I feel honored to have been a part of it. And so I'm grateful that my role now as Willamette Valley recovery coordinator, still allows me to work on Fender’s blue recovery and all. And I took the knowledge that I learned from that species and the landscape and the partnerships, and have been able to now help all these other rare and threatened and endangered species utilizing that information. So.

Cheryl: So like Mikki, I also had not done anything—I had never held a butterfly net before, before I started. Haha. I had gotten interested in ecology in undergrad, and I had worked on islands off the coast of Maine. And, in fact, I'd gone to an island off the coast of Maine and worked with birds. I'm like, "I can watch birds for the summer on an island and get paid for this? Where do I sign up? Where do I sign up? I'm hooked." And I, so I got hooked on ecology in undergrad in Maine. And then it was the 80s. And, you know, it was the era of the spotted owl stuff going on in the Northwest, and it was very much a story—at least from the other Portland—a story of kind of good and evil, right? Good and bad. 

Cheryl: You know, there's the evil side, and the good side is kind of how black and white the spotted owl debate was from there. And I became convinced that science was the way—and particularly mathematics actually—was the way to figure out where the shades of gray are, how you figure out kind of the balance of figuring out ways for endangered species—to both have endangered species and their habitats, and have people in the landscape. And that by using ecology and with the ecological models of how we think about what we can do would be come up with ways of putting these together, you know, to be able to do both. To have both endangered species and people in the landscape. 

Cheryl: And so, I started grad school here trying to think about: well, how am I gonna do this? And what am I gonna do in a practical way? And I got interest in the idea of corridors, because, of course, as I said a couple minutes ago, corridors were this idea of like connecting together parks through the landscape. So, I—but then the question was: how was I gonna actually do this in a way that made any sense? And so, this was an era that was before, you know, email. There was actual snail mail, right? You got newsletters in the mail. And I connected with somebody from The Nature Conservancy at the time, and I told him what I was interested in. 

Cheryl: He put a little new note in the stewardship news of, you know, 'I'm a grad student. I'm interested in this this and this.' And I got—it was great. It was like a kid in the candy store. I got all these different Nature Conservancy’s contacting me about projects that they were interested in. One was in Arizona, one was in Hawaii, one was in New Hampshire. And then Ed Alverson, who was with The Nature Conservancy in Eugene at the time, contacted me about Fender’s blue. And I came down to Eugene, and I was kinda like, well, this—it made sense. Like, I could see. I could look across the landscape. I could see kind of how I could connect together learning about the biology of the species with what we might do with the information.

Cheryl: And so I came down as a grad student that had never held a butterfly net before. And it was a really, really wet year. It was like one of the wettest years on record. And it rained, and rained, and rained, and rained, and I saw a few butterflies, but I was hooked. Haha. 

Cheryl: So it was, it was the beginning of this whole West Eugene wetlands project, which was a partnership. So what Mikki talked about, what kept me going as well as a grad student, was that there was so much interest and so much partnership of like, "How are we gonna do this? And how are we gonna make this work?" And that kind of continued to build over the years from the early 90s on forward of that partnership. 

Cheryl: That just kept going, and I think that kept the—being super excited about this system, because I wasn't gonna write something that was just gonna be in an academic journal, and nobody ever looked at it. People would call me and say, "So, you said we should burn because we need fire. How are we gonna do it? And how do we actually put fire? And actually into those landscapes? And how do we do it in a way that, like we get enough burning to regenerate the soils and the habitats, but not kill all the butterflies that are there? How do we get those balances?"

Cheryl: And it's super fun when somebody gets on the phone and calls you and says, "How do we use this science?" So, I can only hope that people are as good about thinking about embedding science in the backbone of what they do and other things going forward, and don't feel like they have to race to the end of having a solution without taking the steps to do it on the way.

Rachel: That was really wonderful. I think one of the keys to success here is collaboration, and it's just such a great tool that can be applied to so many other species and projects. So, thank you both so much for sharing and for the amazing work that you've done, and for taking the time to come and talk to Matthew and I, and banter a bit about butterflies.

Cheryl: Thank you.

Mikki: Thank you.

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

Matthew: 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 show notes go to xerces.org/bugbanter.