Butterflies Grace an Unlikely Eden Alongside Rockies Highway

This congested crease in the Rocky Mountains is no Garden of Eden. Unless you’re a butterfly.

Charter buses rumble uphill toward mountain casinos, belching diesel fumes. Beer cans glint in the weeds. Boomboxes blare. Naked children, liberated from stifling city slums, shriek alongside kayakers in the icy whitewater of a mountain stream.

On a bright Sunday morning, Clear Creek Canyon seems more like Atlantic City. But for 26 years, the narrow gorge and its surrounding hills 20 miles west of Denver have yielded as many as 113 butterfly species in a single day. That’s 16% of the 700 butterfly species native to the continent.

For sheer variety, it’s the premier butterfly location in the United States, Canada and Europe.

“The only way you can do better,” says Oregon State University entomologist Andrew Warren, “is to go to Mexico or some other tropical place.”

What lures butterflies here, year after year? It’s not the trash or the traffic. It’s the flowers.

Within a few steep miles, dozens of varieties drip with luscious nectar in the canyon’s three distinct climate zones--rolling prairie, scrubby foothills and green alpine forest.

And it’s the butterflies that keep luring Ray Stanford and his posse of 17 net-waving lepidopterists, year after year.

Since 1976 Stanford has coordinated the annual butterfly census here. The event is repeated nationwide by 4,000 volunteers at 450 locations.

Few insects are captured. Most are identified on the wing.

“Silver spotted skipper!”

The wiry Stanford, 60 years old and dappled by the sun, swipes his net over a dogbane thicket sprouting along U.S. Highway 6. One lunge to the right and he would be splattered on a windshield like one of his less fortunate prey. A stumble to the left and he’d pitch over a 100-foot cliff.

He emerges from the shrubbery with his floppy hat askew, oblivious to the danger.

“Hesperis Northwest fritillary!” Stanford shouts at an orange and brown blur.

Butterflies have been pollinating flowering plants since dinosaurs plodded the Earth; 130 million years of evolution have produced 28,500 species worldwide. Some differ by just a few scales on the underside of the hind wing.

It’s such minutiae, combined with their ephemeral beauty, that fuels accomplished amateurs like Stanford.

“Each one has a little brand. Take this one--a Nais metalmark,” Stanford said, cupping a small orange scrap with leopard spots.

What makes it a metalmark?

“A reflective silver spot on its underside,” he said.

Stanford spends weeks preparing for census day. The local tally is forwarded to national coordinators for analysis. Biologists wait months for the results.

That’s because butterfly populations indicate an ecosystem’s vitality. They are acutely sensitive to environmental change, pesticides and pollution.

Butterflies fill the sky over Clear Creek Canyon like a ticker-tape parade. Aphrodites, lupine blues, coral hairstreaks and a western tiger swallowtail large enough to cast a shadow over wild carrot and dill plants, all within 50 yards of the road. For those from elsewhere, it is a rare sight.

“In Southern California, if they find 20 species in the whole of Orange County it’s almost a cause for celebration,” said volunteer Charles Slater of Denver.

More often, conservationists gather to mourn a butterfly’s extinction or the spoiling of its habitat. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the oyamel fir forests of central Mexico, where hundreds of millions of monarch butterflies migrate every winter.

The annual event stirs scientists and poets alike. A single monarch never makes the round trip. They breed along the way, somehow transmitting the route in their genes and completing the migration over generations.

But not, perhaps, for much longer.

New satellite images show that half of the oyamel has been recently logged. Researchers predict the migration could be ruined within 50 years.

“It is incomprehensible to me that a way cannot be found to protect a mere 60 square miles of land that are home to one of the world’s most spectacular biological phenomena,” said University of Illinois entomologist Gilbert Waldbauer.

North of the border, endangered butterflies tangle with bulldozers. The meadows and canyons they favor are prime locations for new resorts, office parks, highways and reservoirs.

Not all butterflies require wilderness, but manicured yards too often are sterile green deserts.

“The more we urbanize our landscape, the fewer kinds of butterflies we’ll have,” said Ann Swengel of the North American Butterfly Assn. Ecologists urge developers to restore the right mix of flowers so butterflies won’t starve.

Recently butterflies have assumed an even more contentious role. In laboratory experiments, monarch caterpillars died after eating milkweed coated with pollen from corn that was genetically engineered to combat pests.

American farmers already plant more than 15 million acres of transgenic corn--20% of the nation’s crop. Biotechnology companies complain the experiments do not realistically test growing conditions.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is preparing new planting regulations. Until then, it has told farmers to limit use of the high-tech seeds.

Few butterfly studies make headlines. Most are labors of love conducted by fastidious amateurs.

No hobbyist pursued butterflies more obsessively than the 20th century novelist Vladimir Nobokov. While writing “Lolita,” he ruined his eyesight peering endlessly at their microscopic genitalia and wing scale patterns. He wrote a landmark report on their evolution.

He ate live butterflies to see if they were poisonous, describing their flavor as a “vile combination of almonds and spoiled cheese.”

Fifty species bear his name or those of his literary characters.

By comparison, Stanford’s biography reads like a story in Boys Life.

Born in San Diego, he was bedridden with rheumatic fever during World War II. He would stare out the window, calling out warplanes droning toward distant Pacific battles.

P-51 Mustang fighter. B-29 Superfortress. Consolidated Catalina Flying Boat.

“Once I could go outside, I discovered butterflies and I forgot about airplanes,” he said.

It is not flight that fascinates him. He is a born classifier. Identifying and cataloging things according to their precise details is his way of making sense of a chaotic world.

By trade, he is a pulmonary pathologist. He examines microscopic tissue samples to diagnose hundreds of lung diseases.

Nights and weekends find him editing butterfly studies, field guides and census reports. He’s counted butterflies in 48 states, missing only Delaware and Hawaii. He keeps a voluminous archive of maps and affixes a sticker for every new species found in census locations.

“You can’t know what to protect until you know where it lives,” Oregon State’s Warren said. “Documenting those basic questions is the goal of Ray’s research.”

Stanford’s fervor is contagious. Some older volunteers haven’t missed an annual count at Clear Creek Canyon. Teenagers who once tagged along have turned pro. One protege, Marc Epstein, is a curator at the Smithsonian Institution.

Butterflies vanish at sunset, to be replaced on nature’s night shift by moths. The Clear Creek Canyon volunteers hurriedly tally their scorecards.

“Moths are too complicated,” explains Jean Morgan. “There are five times as many moths as butterflies.”

The 2000 results: 102 species, 11 shy of the record. It’s a remarkable sum considering that hot and very dry weather all but canceled spring in the West.

A bonus: Five species new to the canyon. More dots on Stanford’s map of Gilpin County.

The bad news: Many species are represented by one or two insects.

It’s an ominous trend, and it’s spreading.

England’s census showed half of its 60 butterfly species are declining. Two went extinct. The Brits blame global warming and shrinking habitats.

“We are sitting on a biodiversity time bomb,” said British census coordinator Richard Fox.

The year’s most significant butterfly--at least to Stanford--has never visited the canyon.

It’s a new variety of skipper found in western Mexico. Warren baptized it after his mentor.

The exact name must remain secret until a scientific panel approves it, probably next year.

It is Stanford’s first namesake in the order Lepidoptera.

One down and 49 to go to equal Nabokov’s record.

Stanford shudders at the comparison. He would have given the late novelist wide berth if they met in a meadow. Especially around lunchtime.

“I’ve never eaten a butterfly,” Stanford says, grimacing. “I think he might have been terrifying.”