Repaying a Debt to Butterflies : Former Gang Member Restores Habitat and Breeds the Insects He Says Saved Him From Street
Butterflies saved Arthur Bonner.
He’ll tell you that. He’ll tell you he needed saving, too. And since many of the butterflies that inadvertently rescued the convicted felon and former gang member are themselves endangered, it is perhaps something of a psychic debt he is repaying at a makeshift biology lab in San Pedro.
The soft-spoken 26-year-old--who took to the streets of South-Central Los Angeles at 8 and figures he was being arrested about once a month by the time he was 13--now spends his days hunched over a microscope in a white room filled with specimen cups and books with titles such as “Advances and Challenges in Insect Rearing.”
He is studying and breeding Quino checkerspots, Palos Verdes blues, green hairstreaks and other butterflies and moths threatened by development on the Palos Verdes Peninsula, as well as restoring their habitat. Although it took him years to make the transition from criminal to biologist-in-training, Bonner hopes to do as much for the insects as they did for him.
“They’re my girls,” he said recently, pointing to a row of captive Palos Verdes blues. “I’m saving them from extinction, and they’re saving me from the street.”
Bonner’s fascination with insects began in his hometown of Crestview, Fla., where the beetles were big and could be captured under the house and chased around the porch. But that interest quickly was exchanged for grittier fun when, at 8, he and his six brothers and sisters moved with their mother into a two-bedroom house near the intersection of 43rd and San Pedro streets.
Now a tall, thin man who smokes filterless Camels but “not in here with my butterflies,” the young Bonner quickly followed two older brothers into the streets, police stations and juvenile detention facilities.
“I couldn’t get enough of jail,” he said as he examined a tiny piece of deer weed for the minuscule egg of a Palos Verdes blue. If nothing else, he said, it made coming home that much sweeter.
A member of a Crips gang he’d rather not specify, Bonner figures he spent about 3 1/2 of the five years from ages 13 to 18 in detention. And that was just fine with him. But in 1988, shortly after turning 18, he shot a man in the face with a pellet gun. The police said it happened during a robbery attempt. Bonner insists it was an accident. He pleaded guilty to one count of assault with a deadly weapon, court records show, and he does not dispute that he had earned his punishment.
“Three years and eight months,” he said slowly, served in the California Correctional Center at Susanville. “I told myself in jail, ‘I want to go right, I want to go right.’ ”
But when he was released at 22, Bonner had no high school diploma, a son who was 3, and few skills that would not land him back behind bars. The conviction he gained in jail about turning his life around began to wane quickly on the outside.
It was a simple suggestion from an older brother, who had spent even more time behind bars, that saved him, Bonner said. The message: Get a job. After nearly a year of hunkering down and doing his best to stay clean at his mother’s house, he applied for a job at the Los Angeles Conservation Corps.
The backbreaking work--pulling weeds, planting trees and restoring habitat at Los Angeles International Airport for the threatened El Segundo blue butterfly--paid just $4.25 an hour. Not the kind of cash to get him the fast cars, shiny jewelry and girls he wanted, and he quit.
“He was such a badass,” said Bruce Saito, executive director of the Conservation Corps, which hires mostly inner-city youth. “He was such a tough guy. He did everything you were supposed to do on the streets. But underneath . . . Arthur was just always kind of special.”
After a few months, Bonner went back. He presumed he would die, probably soon and in a parking lot or street or yard, if he didn’t stay at work and away from the gangs. But there was more to it than that, something about the dune grasses, the sea. There was something about the butterflies. He wasn’t demolishing property or drinking 40-ouncers of malt liquor or swaggering about with guns. He was saving a small blue butterfly whose dwindling numbers, he says now, should be read as a sign that something has gone greatly amiss with the environment. It was, he says, a strange sensation.
The restoration project ended, and “Arthur took it very hard,” said Rudi Mattoni, the UCLA geography lecturer and butterfly expert who ran the program.
The young man had worked harder and shown more interest than he had to for his minimum wage salary, Mattoni said, so he hired Bonner for a new project at the Navy property in San Pedro. He gave Bonner a stack of textbooks, some specimen slides and other laboratory paraphernalia, and told him he was there to help save other threatened species.
So the onetime, full-time bad guy now baby-sits butterflies full time--and for better money. He pokes and prods and reads about butterflies. He slams down the laboratory windows in a near-panic when a pale, spotted Palos Verdes blue appears suddenly from a colorless cocoon. He worries openly that some of these nearly weightless creatures will disappear for good. And he doesn’t care who knows it.
“They get breakfast in bed,” Bonner said shortly after explaining the fine points of captive breeding to a well-versed visitor from the British Butterfly Conservation Society. “I talk to them. I cook for them. I don’t know if they understand or not, but when I feed my butterflies, I shape their food [bits of deer weed] into little shapes.”
He chuckles quietly. “My old friends won’t hang around with me now. They say I done gone soft.”
Perhaps, Bonner says. But he has his own place now, and the beginnings of a small scientific library. College seems a possibility. He’s even started a program bringing troubled teens from another Conservation Corps group to the area to restore habitat.
“I have me a job here,” he said. “I may even have a career. I’m not actually a scientist, but one day I hope I can say I am.”
