North Coast Diaries

Neotropicals on the march

I spent the day counting violets (Viola adunca) along a riparian corridor this morning. while working I also got to watch a steady parade of warblers and flycatchers moving north. The numbers provided below are conservative....

Western Wood-Pewee          1  
Hammond's Flycatcher        1
Pacific-slope Flycatcher    3
Hutton's Vireo              1
Orange-crowned Warbler      30
Yellow-rumped Warbler       15 (both Myrtle and Audubon's)
Black-throated Gray Warbler 10
Common Yellowthroat         1
Wilson's Warbler            4

The Western Wood-pewee was on the early side, but not unprecidented.

Dueling Lepidopterists

An unsigned missive, written in first person and addressing the criticisms aimed at Dr. Jefferey Glassberg relative to the an article Dr Glassberg wrote in Birding magazine appeared on the Northwest Lepidoptera list serve yesterday. Dr. Glassberg is almost certainly the author, though most on the list have taken to calling it a possible hoax (mostly tongue-in-cheek) because it was unsigned. What I found most intriguing was the attempt by the author to moderate claims made in the original Birding article regarding the use of nets. Now "amateur" collectors are the only target. "Scientific" collecting is, apparently, okay. There are enough collectors in the lep community not connected to institutions who are doing genuine science that the scientific vs amateur divide gets pretty slippery. There are certainly contradictions in the notion of killing butterflies to protect them and collectors are going to have to find ways to get past that. Collectors are way too defensive on this issue and it's not helping their side. It may not always be appropriate to bring one's net along to every outing. Collectors may want to reassess the trade-offs between protecting collector rights and appealing to all audiences toward the bigger picture. But the Glassbergian frontal assault is abusive and insulting. The author of the unsigned letter to Northwest Leps did nothing to soften that basic problem.

The author also gets into a semantical argument over "official" taxonomic lists. Dr. Glassberg favors the NABA list which is not surprising given that he's the front-man for that organization. Others champion a list produced by the Xerces Society and published by the Smithsonian. And these are not the only two North American lists. There are a couple out of Canada and an international list, each at odds with the NABA and Xerces lists. The author of our unsigned post seems bothered by the use of a connector between Xerces and the Smithsonian (Xerces/Smithsonian). Obviously, the author fears that connecting the Xerces list with the Smithsonian gives it the appearance of being more official. There is no doubt that Lepidopteran community needs to get its collective act together and create an AOU-like general list of accepted names, subject to periodic scientific review. I, for one, am tired of being corrected by someone using a different reference, especially when it's some obscure regional reference that is being used to make the correction.

Painted Ladies on the move

This year is shaping up to be an irruptive year for PAINTED LADIES (Vanessa cardui). I spent the sunny parts of last weekend counting ladies at selected sites here in Clatsop County. There are a lot of Painted Ladies around, but not nearly as many as are being reported in California where traffic stopping clouds of butterflies are being seen.

See: Seattle Times .

Irruptive movements are a regular occurance among butterflies. I got to see a northbound movement of CALIFORNIA TORTOISESHELLS (Nymphalis californica) back in July of 2002, when 1000's were moving north through the Cascades that also had traffic stopped. It's a pretty amazing sight.

Another famous butterfly migrant is the MONARCH (Danaus plexippus). Monarchs (and Painted Ladies to a lesser extent) are controversial. They take up valuable real estate on their winter ground interferring logging and residential development putting wild populations at odds with developers. At the same time, there is a growing market in live Monarchs, either adults for releases at weddings and parties or as caterpillars for school projects. Some claim that Monarch losses can be mitigated by captive rearing. Some claim that captive rearing muddies the gene pool and makes it difficult to monitor genuinely wild populations. Some claim that release of butterflies bred in captivity has no effect on wild populations one way or the other. Some claim that diminishing winter habitats have put wild populations of Monarchs in jeopardy and unmanaged (and largely avocational) release programs only serve to mask real environmental proplems. Others argue that any crisis has been manufactured by radical environmentalists and a liberal media.

I prefer to err on the side of diversity and habitat protection. If there's a flaw in the endangered species act, it's the lack of an ecological perspective. Habitat loss is the number one cause of species declines, but protection rules don't kick in until it can be proved that the damage has already been done. This seems like an odd way to protect things. Arguements that habitat distruction can be offset by captive breeding programs are cleanly counter-intuitive. Any captive breeding program needs to be tied to a healthy place to go in the wild upon release. Captive breeding should be thought of as a stop-gap measure, not a solution to species declines.

March Lowdown

It rained through a big chunk of March, causing minor flooding, but probably didn't solve the big-picture drought (snow pack didn't change enough).

Migrants are running right about on time. TREE, VIOLET-GREEN and CLIFF SWALLOWS all checked in at or near expected arrival dates.

Singing ORANGE-CROWNED WARBLERS showed up at the South Jetty of the Columbia River around the 18th.

CASPIAN TERNS were on Youngs Bay by the 27th.

The last reliable sighting of the Seaside YELLOW-THROATED WARBLER was Mar 2.