Beating the butterfly blues

One of our partners, the Albany Pine Bush Preserve Commission, is celebrating its 25^th anniversary today! The commission protects and manages the Albany Pine Bush for ecological, recreational and educational benefits. Among other conservation efforts, the commission manages young forest habitat (called pitch pine-scrub oak barrens) for endangered Karner blue butterflies and other wildlife. Earlier this summer, we visited the preserve to help release some captive-reared butterflies! Summer intern Beth Decker shares some of her thoughts from the day.

Beth Decker captures footage of a recently released endangered Karner blue butterfly. Credit: USFWS

As a college student at a summer internship, I don’t always know what my day will hold, but I dread the thought of sitting and sorting paper all day.

Such was my situation on a recent Tuesday morning. I walked into the office and was asked if I wanted to go see the Albany Pine Bush Preserve, which is located just a few miles out of Albany, N.Y., and release endangered Karner blue butterflies. I was not sure what to expect.

The next morning came, and I was on my way to see these blue-winged butterflies, distinguished by the multiple orange dots on the wings’ underside. I joined Robyn Niver and Bethany Holbrook from our New York field office, along with Meagan Racey from our regional office, Kathy O’Brien from the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation and our fantastic guide Neil Gifford, the Commission’s conservation director, to release some butterflies into the wild at a habitat project in the preserve.

We gathered a few white mesh cubes and set off. I thought with confusion, “Where are the butterflies?” It turns out that the butterflies were inside the cubes, and their tiny size of about a quarter makes them hard to see from a distance.

The butterflies are carried in these white mesh containers. Neil Gifford, Kathy O’Brien and Robyn Niver prepare to release butterflies in one of the preserve’s habitat restoration areas. Credit: USFWS

As we all set off into the habitat where the Karners were to be released, I expected to meander through an open pasture of wildflowers and grasses. That’s what all butterflies like, right?

Wrong. I learned that the Karner likes a partly shaded environment with mostly young, thick vegetation and a few large trees. The young forest was surprisingly pretty, and it supports other animals like box turtles and Cooper’s hawks.

I learned from Neil that the Karner is completely dependent on the blue lupine plant, which is also rather small like the Karner itself! The lupine is the only thing the Karner caterpillars will eat and is the preferred plant on which adults lay their eggs.

“Picture a wide open landscape filled with dense shrubs, scattered pitch pines, openings of prairie grass and wildflowers all rooted in sweeping sand dunes.” This is the Albany Pine Bush Preserve. Credit: USFWS

The Karner faces decreasing young forest and lupine habitat – and an influx of people competing for the same space. Thinking of the urban spaces of Albany just outside the preserve, I realized just how difficult it might be getting for the Karner.

Luckily, the population has grown quite healthy in the Albany Pine Brush Preserve! The combination of releasing butterflies and creating the ideal habitat with prescribed burns, cutting, and planting more lupine seeds is really helping out.

From the Albany Pine Bush Preserve: After more than 50 years of decline, the Karner blue has returned to former haunts throughout the 3,200-acre preserve. This insect, first studied and named by zoologist and renowned author Vladimir Nabokov in 1944, can now be found at nearly 60 sites covering more than 200 acres of the preserve. Credit: USFWS

The releases really help establish the population in the newly restored areas. When we opened the mesh cubes to release the Karners, their wings opened and they fluttered in the excitement of the striking sunlight. I couldn’t help but feel excited and happy for them. When we opened up the mesh cages, they slowly few out of them and were close enough to touch…One even landed on me!

My experience with the Karner blues that day was incredible, and a good surprise job on my internship. I hope to see them again sometime – and want to give a huge thanks to Neil and the preserve for such an amazing opportunity!

 

Capturing the mission

Young N’ Wild brings us on a journey through the lens with Beth Decker. Whether documenting the plight of endangered species or creatively conveying the message of conservation through video, Beth works to help show our mission in action.

For the past two summers, I have been working at the Service’s Northeast Regional Office in Hadley, Mass. in our broadcast department. We’re the side of the Service that most people may not know about- we work with our public affairs team to tell our stories using multimedia. I have had the privilege to see conservation in action, and document it so people are aware of the work we do. All along the way, I get to meet some amazing people.

Usually I’m filming or editing a video after getting the chance to visit one of our national wildlife refuges or field offices. I’ve had some great experiences here:

• I worked on a project to document red knots, migratory birds that travel from lower South America to the Artic Circle for their migration. I met bird surveyors from New Zealand, Australia and the United Kingdom, who monitor a different subspecies of these birds at other times of the year.
• I’ve filmed endangered Karner blue butterflies that are about the size of a quarter and have beautiful blue wings. I witnessed biologists releasing them into their natural habitat and learned how their numbers were increasing in the Albany Pine Bush Preserve because of these releases.
  

  Here, I was filming Karner blue butterflies at the Albany Pine Bush Preserve in New York.

• I also got footage of the endangered Puritan tiger beetle that lives on these huge cliffs that are continuously falling into the ocean. These continuous falls help the beetles because they need the fresh sand and require small amounts of vegetation.
  

  We were headed out to get footage of the Puritan tiger beetles and the beaches they live on.

• As part of an effort to document old remnants that were washing ashore the beach at Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge, I helped to film a wreck tagging training so that Service staff and volunteers would know how to document old objects that are found on the beach from ship wrecks that happened hundreds of years ago.

I enjoy all of the work that I do, whether its out in the field amidst all the action, or at my computer screen trying to make a video that will convey the importance of our conservation mission. I’m always excited to start my next project and show our mission in action!

Helping a small butterfly on the road to recovery in New York

I’m Bethany Holbrook, and I work at our New York Field Office. You’ll be hearing from me every week! Stay tuned for tales from the great state of New York.

The Albany Pine Bush Preserve Commission (APBPC) is working to protect a species as small as your thumbnail.  The APBPC manages thousands of acres of the sandy pitch pine-scrub oak barrens ecosystem to restore habitat for the Karner blue butterfly, a species that has been federally endangered since 1992.  Karners’ are known for their beautiful bright blue colored wings, seen typically in males.  Females are grayish brown, but both sexes are gray on the undersides of their wings.  Their rarity throughout New York State is what makes the Albany Pine Bush such a spectacular place to visit.

A Karner blue butterfly on a spotted knapweed flower.

A wild lupine plant; the only known food source for Karners at the caterpillar stage.

The butterflies are found in select states, including Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, New York, and New Hampshire.  Within most of these states, Karner populations are limited to just a few areas because of their requirement for relatively open sites with sandy soil that will support the wild lupine plant, the Karner’s only known food source at the caterpillar stage.  Adult butterflies feed on nectar from a variety of flowers, but without lupine, Karner blue butterfly populations cannot survive.

Recently, the APBPC presented visitors with the rare opportunity to see Karner blue butterflies released into the preserve as part of their conservation plan to boost population numbers.  Watch this video, which is also below, to see how the butterflies are released after a long 300 mile journey from egg to butterfly between the Albany Pine Bush and the rearing facility in Concord, NH.

A mesh holding container inside the Discovery Center at the Albany Pine Bush. The chrysalises are in the petri dish behind the orange butterfly weed flowers that adult butterflies will feed on. The adult butterfly climbing up the left side of the container recently emerged.

The Karner blue butterfly has declined over the years mainly because of two reasons.  The open sandy soils are perfect locations to build homes and businesses because the ground offers good drainage.  Also, without management, sites can become overgrown with trees through natural succession or with invasive species.  The APBPC has worked with many local, state, and federal organizations to protect, restore, and manage Karner blue butterfly habitat.  To protect these lands the APBPC works with willing landowners to buy or put conservation easements on parcels of land.  Then, restoration is done to continuously manage the sites, making them suitable for Karner blue butterflies.

The ideal habitat that the APBPC is trying to model with these restoration efforts is an open savannah-like area with as few as 30 trees per acre, and a balance of medium height scrub oak plants and other shrubs, and low growing wild lupine.  This provides wild lupine plants with enough space and sunlight to grow.  Unfortunately, shrubby plants and trees grow much taller than lupine, blocking sunlight and disturbing the open area Karners prefer.  To manage shrubby plants, APBPC uses the following restoration methods, which are evaluated by habitat and butterfly monitoring which determine the timeline and approach for each technique:

• Mowing:  To manage vegetation growth, APBPC staff will mow tall vegetation every other year in areas where there is heavy lupine growth; this doesn’t damage the lupine plants, but simply suppresses the height of taller shrubs.
• Burning:  In areas where there is little to no lupine growth, an APBPC burn team will perform a prescribed burn in a pre-determined area to remove taller vegetation, then seed for lupine one week after the fire.
• Mechanical removal:  Mechanical removal of trees or shrubs is necessary when they cannot be maintained by fire or mowing.  Typically, this includes cutting down tall trees or thick, woody shrubs.
• Herbicide treatment:  In some areas of the Pine Bush, scrub oak plants can become very tall; these areas require treatment by a herbicide because they are too tall to be mowed and they cannot be burned because they are growing in areas with heavy lupine growth.

VIDEO: Butterflies captured from the Pine Bush are transported to rearing facility in New Hampshire