Aflutter Over a Butterfly Census in Palos Verdes

For one thing, they’re prettier than moths. For another, butterflies have little knobs on the ends of their antennae. Butterflies fly by day, moths by night. Butterflies don’t eat your sweater. They spin chrysalises, which sound a lot nicer than cocoons. And nobody--at least nobody in Southern California--goes on a Moth Count.

They went looking for butterflies the other day, the yearly Butterfly Count on Palos Verdes Peninsula, where they tend to do things like that.

Like birders, they would have loved to have found a new species, especially in view of the recent buttercide in Hesse Park, where less sensitive souls laid out a softball field and forever destroyed the buckwheat habitat of the late, lamented, unique Blue Butterfly.

This year, spurred by the Xerces Society’s ongoing nationwide count and abetted by the PVP Audubon Society, about 50 lepidoptera watchers spotted about 1,500 butterflies comprising 26 species. No new ones this year, though 11 people saw the “bee-fly,” the baneful bug first sighted in the spring by Rick Rogers, and of which the less said the better.

Back to butterflies. “Each has its own favorite flowers,” says Shirley Borks of the Audubon Society: “honeysuckle, lantana, buckwheat. They’re fascinating. They have these little tongues, like hummingbirds, that sup nectar. Their eyes are constructed so the nectar appears sort of as ultraviolet. We can’t see it, but they can.”

Contrary to popular belief, butterflies don’t die the day after they make their final passage from caterpillar-hood. “Depending on size, they usually live for a month,” Borks says. “Even that isn’t much, considering all the trouble they have to go to from larva to pupa to chrysalis, et cetera.”

On a happier note, the count, terminating with a picnic lunch in infamous Hesse Park, made for a “really fun day,” Borks says. Among less common species, “We saw a Cloudless Sulfur--cheerful yellow, with a few freckles--and in a patch of fennel, a really spectacular Anise Swallowtail.

“Last year--I have to tell you because I’m proud of it--on one of our walks I saw this big, beautiful Red Admiral, caught in a spider web. I very gently let him go. I tell you, it made my day!”