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In 2021, for example, there was an abundance of Taylor’s checkerspot butterflies at Scatter Creek, but after the extreme heat dome event that year, which added “insult to the injury” of an already chronically dry spring, only 10% survived. “Now you’ve just selected for animals that can tolerate hot and dry conditions. If the next year is then cold and wet, you drive them through another bottleneck.” Then, she says, you’re left trying to rebuild with an extremely small percentage of the original population.
And yet, Taylor’s checkerspots continue to surprise.
“I have never seen anything that has so many tricks up its sleeves for getting through changing conditions,” Linders says. “They’re very behaviorally adaptive. It really speaks to how strong the force of life is. Life doesn’t give up easily and I think these guys are just a prime example of that.”
Nothing says resilience like resurrection. On the northern shores of the Salish Sea, Taylor’s checkerspot butterflies were once common but hadn’t been since the late 1990s, and were presumed extirpated in Canada. Then one spring day in 2005, Jenny Balke went for a walk with a friend near her home on Denman Island, British Columbia, 270 kilometers north of the prison at Mission Creek. As a biologist and conservationist, she’s spent most of her long career working and volunteering for the preservation of wildlife and wilderness. She did a double-take when she spied and counted what appeared to be about 40 Taylor’s checkerspots along a trail. Disbelieving her eyes, she thought perhaps it was one of the over 30 related subspecies of Edith’s checkerspot butterflies. She pulled out her camera, captured some images, and sent them to Cris Guppy, whom she describes as Western Canada’s leading butterfly specialist. Guppy confirmed the good news: Taylor’s checkerspots were suddenly back on the list of Canada’s living fauna.
Denman Island is a rural community of nearly 1,400 residents where remnants of suitable, open butterfly habitat still exist. The Denman Conservancy Association took up the cause of the rediscovered butterfly and members got down to work. Among them was Peter Karsten, retired director of the Calgary Zoo. After learning about the launch of the breeding program for Taylor’s checkerspot butterflies at the Oregon Zoo, he contacted the provincial government ministry responsible for the environment to ask why there wasn’t a similar program in British Columbia. He recalls being told there was no money, no facility and no expertise for such an undertaking.
“I have a place, I’ll find the money and I’m still connected to the conservation community,” Karsten replied. During his tenure at the Calgary Zoo, he captive-bred northern swift foxes, wood bison, whooping cranes and Vancouver Island marmots, among others. “My whole life has been enriched with success stories of working with endangered species,” he says. “I have had the most exciting life you can imagine.”
When Taylor’s checkerspots reappeared in 2005, Karsten had already been retired for 11 years. Like the women at Mission Creek, he found himself with time on his hands, so he volunteered to lead what would become a captive breeding program.
Finally, in December 2012, with the help of fellow Denman Islanders, Karsten started converting a building on his property into a breeding lab and growing food plants for butterflies. Within four months, both the lab and crop were ready—all that was missing were butterflies. Balke, now constantly on the lookout, had observed a Taylor’s checkerspot laying eggs along a trail in May 2013. Concerned they would be trampled, she contacted Karsten, who collected those 18 eggs and produced 12 adult butterflies. Other wild-caught specimens were added to increase genetic diversity. Two years later, he and fellow islanders began releasing caterpillars into habitat restored by volunteers.
The project quickly grew. Although the breeding effort was a success, during the breeding and rearing season, it required 14-hour days from Karsten and an untold number of hours from the many volunteers. “I was amazed but not surprised,” Karsten says, at the way the community stepped up and donated their time. And like Linders in Washington, he found himself fascinated by the animals themselves. “We always think that insects don’t have memory, they don’t have a brain, and they can’t reason — that they are just basic organisms sort of chugging along,” he says. It surprised him to find the caterpillars had learned his routine.
Every day, Karsten would open their containers, pick up each individual and put them on the scale to weigh them and track their development. At first their defense mechanism would kick in and they’d roll into a ball, but he would always feed them directly after. They soon dropped the defensive posture when it was time to weigh in. “Once they realized that getting handled means ‘I’m going to get fresh food,’ I could see the fear response drop,” Karsten says. “These animals definitely changed based on experience.”
Karsten, now 85, says he finally had to call it quits in 2016 to care for his wife, who’d had a stroke. It was time to put this important project in the hands of an organization with more people and resources. He passed the breeding program to the Greater Vancouver Zoo, now part of British Columbia’s Taylor’s Checkerspot Butterfly Recovery Project Team, a collaboration between government and volunteer efforts.
Since captive breeding began on Denman Island in 2013, approximately 10,000 Taylor’s checkerspot caterpillars have been released, and part of Denman Island Park has been set aside for their conservation. The species has been reintroduced to nearby Hornby Island, less than 10 kilometers to the east, and a new wild population has been discovered about 60 kilometers north, on Vancouver Island. Many of the same habitat pressures and climatic events that have plagued Taylor’s checkerspot butterfly populations in the south Puget Sound region have also been felt in British Columbia. And yet the butterflies, and those dedicated to saving them, persist.
At last the moment has arrived to see Taylor’s checkerspots fly. I am ready to witness them in their legions, gathering nectar from wildflowers, searching for mates, laying eggs during those handful of days they exist as butterflies.
Neil Wilson and Bill Hamilton, otherwise-retired volunteers with Hornby Island’s Taylor’s checkerspot butterfly recovery efforts, offer to help pick an optimal time and provide on-the-spot identification. One day in May we emerge from a forest trail into a stunning, windswept meadow on the bluffs of Hornby Island’s Helliwell Park, overlooking the Salish Sea. Here too, open fields are being rehabilitated with native vegetation to support Taylor’s checkerspots. Last November, local schoolchildren were out planting woolly sunflower, yarrow and field chickweed despite the cold and driving rain.