Butterfly Threatens to Leave Costly Legacy

It is one of Southern California’s great environmental mysteries: an orange-and-black butterfly, once so commonplace as to be ignored by collectors, is now on the verge of disappearing.

No one knows why the Quino checkerspot is becoming extinct, or how to save it.

Tougher still is how and where to track it down. Unlike such rarities as the northern spotted owl and California gnatcatcher, which are difficult enough to locate, Quinos are believed to spend most of the year as tiny, dormant caterpillars hidden under rocks and in crevices.

And with all these riddles unanswered, some experts suspect that within a decade or sooner, the Quino may vanish.

“I do not believe we’re going to save this butterfly,” says Dennis Murphy, a well-known expert in conservation biology who contends that the Quino is “at as great a risk of extinction as any individual species in the country.”

Federal entomologist Chris Nagano sums up the Quino’s plight this way: “Four engines out and about 10 seconds to impact.”

The Quino once flourished in a huge swath from the Santa Monica Mountains south into Baja and east to the desert. It seems to have already vanished from Los Angeles and Orange counties years ago.

As it nose dives, the butterfly threatens to spark a new fracas over the Endangered Species Act in regions such as southern San Diego County and southwest Riverside County, last bastions of the butterfly and also areas of home construction. Other developers in Orange, Riverside and San Diego counties conducted surveys this spring to make sure they did not have the Quino in their midst.

Some think the butterfly, which was placed on the federal endangered list last year, may mean worse headaches for conservationists and builders than the Stephens kangaroo rat, which triggered a now-legendary battle over property rights and species protection.

After all, you can spot a rat or a gnatcatcher, but what about a one-inch butterfly that sprouts wings and flies only a few weeks a year and whose larvae can stay dormant for years at a time?

How do developers deal with a species they can’t even see?

“There’s going to be millions of dollars lost as a result of the Quino checkerspot to various landowners,” estimated Brice Kittle, vice president of Van Daele Development Corp., which is building homes in Riverside County and surrounding areas.

The Quino has the potential in areas where it lives, he said, “of slowing down the ability to deliver housing, or buildings, anything that’s affected by the grading of ungraded property.”

Others suspect that the Quino’s ranks have shrunk so severely that its economic impact will be slight compared to the gnatcatcher and kangaroo rat. And some hope that landmark nature preserves being crafted across the region with the blessing of the Clinton and Wilson administrations will give the Quino one last stab at life.

But still others think the fight may have been lost years ago, with the federal government’s nine-year delay in adding the Quino to the endangered species list, coupled with continued growth in the Los Angeles area.

“It’s an exercise in blown opportunities,” said Murphy, who petitioned in 1988 to win the butterfly federal protection and succeeded only last year.

“We’re going to cause economic displacement, but with no hope of conservation victory,” Murphy said. “It’s a bummer.”

The Quino is not the only California butterfly in trouble.

Of the 16 varieties on the federal endangered species list, 10 live in California, where homes and freeways have supplanted the unique mixture of plants that they crave.

Many rare California butterflies confine themselves to small geographic areas, such as the El Segundo blue butterfly that favors the dunes near Los Angeles International Airport. Its distant cousin, the endangered Palos Verdes blue, disappeared from the Palos Verdes Peninsula in the early 1980s, only to reemerge in 1994 in nearby San Pedro.

But the Quino’s sweeping historic range makes it an enigma for scientists astonished at how such a common butterfly occupying such a wide area could plummet to endangered status in so short a time.

Some remember when the Quino was so populous in the Otay Mesa area near the Mexican border that drivers found it splayed on their windshields as winged road kill.

Orange County lay at the heart of its territory. In a handwritten 1989 letter in federal records, Orange County native John W. Johnson describes his 60 years of tracking the Quino, starting in 1933 and 1934 in what is now Irvine Regional Park. He reports long-gone colonies in Upper Laguna Canyon, Black Star Ranch and Dana Point. The Quino was last officially reported in the county in Black Star Canyon in 1967 and then vanished.

“The only means of preventing total extinction,” Johnson wrote in 1989, “is the acquisition of colony sites with enough buffer lands surrounding them. These sites should be fenced and closed to all disturbance, including human access.”

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Today, the U.S. Quino population seems restricted to a few areas in Riverside and San Diego counties.

Scientists can reel off the key causes for its disappearance: suburbanization, agriculture, the invasion of nonnative grasses that squeezed out the plants that nourish Quino larvae. But some are perplexed about why the butterfly seems to have disappeared from areas rich with those plants.

“Quino is going a lot faster than its habitat is going, which has us concerned,” said Gordon Pratt of UC Riverside, who is surveying the butterfly’s range for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Southern California’s economic recovery means that people hope to build on some of the land where the butterfly is clinging to life.

Those spots include southwest Riverside County, where federal officials are probing three alleged cases in which landowners may have intentionally destroyed Quino habitat.

Some landowners fear a regulatory tug-of-war as vicious as that triggered by the infamous Stephens kangaroo rat.

“These species are being looked at as unwelcome as toxic waste on your land,” said Dennis Hollingsworth of Murietta, whose consulting firm assists landowners with endangered species issues.

He calls the Quino a microcosm of problems with the 1973 Endangered Species Act, which he says made the butterfly a liability for property owners instead of an asset. A landowner with land containing butterflies might well decide to “go to the hardware store and buy Roundup.” While the Fish and Wildlife Service is still studying where the Quino--one of hundreds of species of butterflies in North America--can be found, some developers think that work should have come before the endangered species listing.

“In the interim, they’ve created havoc, chaos, they’ve damaged land values,” said Gary Hillman of Realty Executives in the Lake Mathews area.

Last fall, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service began issuing guidelines for dealing with the Quino throughout Southern California. A map of high and low butterfly concentrations should be ready by autumn, to be used in designing a recovery plan.

But even those charged with protecting the Quino acknowledge the problems ahead. To save the butterfly, said Nagano, “is going to take truly extraordinary measures by everyone.”