Schiess: Butterflies become Food for Birds

The banquet tables were set. Eight families of beautiful butterflies were consuming the offerings not unlike the glutton royalties of ancient times; only the food would not be to the liking of humanoids. On my way to pick huckleberries near Heise, I noticed the food for these handsome insects was indeed bear and coyote poop.

“One man’s junk is another man’s desire,” I thought as I watched the show on the road and the nearby late-blooming flowers. Butterflies do many gross things and collecting salts and minerals from partially digested matter from the droppings of animals is just one of them.

Then enter the birds.

Songbirds were also having a feast. The abundant butterflies along the road leading to my No-tellum Huckleberry Patch had become the birds’ feast. By snatching a swallowtail butterfly out of the air, a kingbird appeared to be a four-winged monster from ages past as it flew to a nearby quaking aspen.

The summer has appeared to be good for the hatching of butterflies that provided ample food for the birds. Dozens of birds were busy along the foothill forest darting and diving for the colorful insects flying through the patches of Hairy Golden Aster, Western coneflowers and Common cowparsnip.

The most numerous were the Fritillaries with Blues, Coppers, Whites, Admirals, Commas and a few Swallowtails and Sulphurs mixed in. The flycatchers were having a field day harvesting the butterflies as they fluttered from banquet to banquet table. One swallowtail escaped a kingbird with half a wing missing only to be nailed by a Dusky Flycatcher before it could land.

Butterflies are more abundant in the foothills or mountains than the valley where they can find suitable plants to carry out their life cycle. Most butterflies live a short adult life from a few days to several weeks. This short life is dominated with reproduction and eating.

Many males become adults before the females and spend this time cruising the ridge tops and streams looking for a mate. They even congregate around mud puddles or flowers in bachelor parties as they wait for a suitable female to show up.

Butterflies go through four stages during their life cycle. Eggs laid by females soon after breeding are hatched into a caterpillar or larva. These are eating machines, wolfing down large amounts of vegetation. It is critical to their survival that the eggs are deposited on suitable plants so the caterpillars have the right food to develop. The caterpillar passes through about five stages or instars. Because its skin can only stretch so far it has to shed to grow larger.

Finally it enters into the pupa stage where it develops into an adult. The hard case of the pupa will split and the adult will emerge taking several hours for the wings to unfold and dry sufficiently for it to fly off.

Identification of butterflies can be very difficult. Within the Fritillary family there are about 14 different species in Idaho. Very subtle differences on the under-wing classify them into different species. These species will inhabit the same areas and cross-breed creating different color combinations which causes confusion for field workers.

Just as in humans, not all of one species looks the same as individuals from the same parents are different. Identification of butterflies is based on size, posture, shape, color and flight patterns. Recently while viewing hundreds of orange and black Fritillaries, the orange was replaced by white on one individual.

Identification of butterflies may be difficult for most humans but not the birds in the mountains: to the birds they all look like a T-bone steak to a meat-loving human.