Butterflies Are Free No Longer


When I was a boy growing up in western Pennsylvania in the 1950s, just outside a small town, we had a neighboring field (known to adults as the "vacant lots") and several lots worth of trees across the street (which my mother called "the weeds.") So my childhood was filled with dandelions and violets, robins and cardinals, goldfinches, blue jays and bluebirds, and with butterflies. An enormous variety of butterflies--oranges, yellows, whites, blues, black and whites, all sizes and patterns.

I've never seen that profusion of butterflies again. The past few years here in far northern California, we've been blessed with some. Clusters of small white butterflies for awhile, and the occasional monarch-mimic orange and black patterned ones.

But this year, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, we may not see them. And possibly we may not see them ever again.

Wild fluctuations in California's winter and spring weather have hurt fragile butterfly populations, causing numbers to fall to the lowest in more than three decades and increasing the concerns of scientists about long-term declines linked to climate change and habitat loss.

UC Davis Professor Arthur Shapiro, considered one of the most prominent butterfly trackers in North America, said Monday he has found fewer butterflies this year than at anytime since he came to California 35 years ago.

"We have a severe depression of butterfly numbers at the lower elevations in Northern California, particularly in the Central Valley. We don't know if local populations are extinct or have dropped to low levels that we're unlikely to detect,'' he said.

The very possibility of extinction is chilling. This is a dramatic illustration of one of the many complex effects of the Climate Crisis. Call it a cascade effect, call it a tear in the web of life, but global heating together with other phenomena, mostly due to human abuse of nature but some of it the ordinary cycles and variations, can have drastic consequences.