Counting Karner Blues

Isn't this the most gorgeous little blue butterfly? It's the Karner blue, Lycaeides melissa samuelis, an endangered species, and it lives right here in little pockets of prairie or savannah. For the past several years, the Manistee National Forest has been conducting population surveys, and doing a lot of active habitat restoration. For the surveys they have been requesting volunteers to help. Since I was busy finishing my big hiking quest, I didn't get a chance to participate, and I've really wanted to.



This year, I'll be helping twice. Today was the first day. First we had a safety session, and then the group was divided into pairs. Someone experienced was a counter, and the rest of us were data recorders.

Then we drove for an hour to reach the site. We all went in Forest Service vehicles. Finally, we were ready to count butterflies! There are over 150 plots which have been marked out for several years. In these plots there are lines (marked by flagging tape) called transects. We would walk the length of each transect. The picture below is the summer staff person I was paired with. If she saw Karner blues she would use the measuring stick, as she's posing with it here. There are colored bands in the sections which measure distance from the transect line. She would tell me where she saw the butterfly and I would record it on a datasheet. Each plot has to be counted once a week, so that's why they need help from volunteers.



From this data, it can be estimated how many of the Karner blues are in the entire plot. Some of the plots have had controlled burns so that prairie plants can grow back. Some have had additional lupine planted. The Karner blue requires lupine for reproduction. The adults like the nectar from horsemint and yarrow, so quite a lot of those have been planted too.

The top picture shows one with its wings closed. This could be either sex. The thing to look for is the rows of orange crescents along the edges and the scattered black spots with white edges. Each butterfly is only about an inch across.

But when they open their wings- the second picture, the males are a clear bright blue with black edges. They look a lot like the Spring Azure. But the Azure has no orange on the outside of its wings.

The female Karners have dark, blue-gray wings with a row of orange crescents on the lower wing. I couldn't quite get a picture of a female with the wings completely open, but you can see one set of wings.



So, how many did we see? Erin and I walked a total of 5 plots. In the first one, we saw none. Then we saw 3 in the next one, and 5 in the one after that. We did one more plot before lunch, and didn't see any Karner blues there. After lunch we did one more plot, and saw one more butterfly. Is this good? I have no idea. That's the one real frustration with volunteering for things like this- you have no clue where anything fits into the larger scheme of things.

It was cloudy, hot and humid. Not an ideal day for the butterflies to be out. So I'm thinking what we saw might be significant. At any rate, I got to help with and see for myself an Endangered Species.

It was miserably hot, but the overcast sky helped a little bit. Wednesday is supposed to be even worse. If it actually rains the count will be cancelled because the butterflies hunker down in the rain. I'm glad I got some halfway decent pictures today.

See Wild Lupine