A warm June day: we’re walking on the grass above the beach, gazing across the strait at the Olympic Mountains, when suddenly I’m attacked by a dementedly out of control … butterfly.
Truly.
Apparently a certain shade of red drives a butterfly wild, specifically the shade of my jacket. At first this handsome black, white and yellow fellow (wingspan about three inches) landed on my shoulder like a messenger from heaven. My friend took a picture. She didn’t take one when it began a frenzied attack on my red jacket however (wingspan now six inches), which sent me yelling down the beach — she was laughing too hard.
The butterfly wouldn’t give up no matter how much I yelled, swatted and twisted away. The heavenly visitor had become a hound of hell (wingspan eight inches), the fragile flutterer a predatory pteradactyl. Was this normal? Later I consulted the butterfly books. I also googled “violent butterflies”. What kind of nectar had the beast been on?
I learned that life is tough for a butterfly. They’re migrating spring and fall, laying eggs in spring when larvae (caterpillars) must quickly devour all the food they can before drought sets in and kills the plant sources, which happens increasingly often. Once winter rains come, these larvae grow, form a chrysalis, and emerge as an adult early next spring to repeat the cycle of mating and laying eggs … and going into frenzies at the sight of a certain shade of red.
Before the butterfly incident I had been watching crows chasing away two eagles that were trying to rob their nests. Do such dramas happen among butterflies too? Was the one who attacked my jacket trying to chase me away, or was it on a desperate mission to find enough food and get more eggs out there for the next generation? I think it was the latter. Butterflies eat both nectar and pollen. There were yellow and orange poppy-like flowers along the beach, but also a few sporting the pink-red colour of my jacket. Maybe the butterfly thought I was a huge example of the least plentiful but most desirable kind of flower.
“Butterflies are finicky eaters,” says ecologist Paul Ehrlich. Apparently they want what they want and they want it now — and one of them thought I was it.
The red of my jacket is the colour of flowers of the Showy Milkweed which is found locally and favoured by monarch butterflies. My attacker was yellow and black, but didn’t seem as orange as a monarch, which is actually rarely seen in our area. If this was a monarch I should cut the poor thing some slack. Each monarch endures thousands of miles of migration to Mexico (or from there to here, but not both ways for one generation goes one way and the next the opposite). It’s gruelling and made much harder by the fact that the habitat along the routes they follow has been destroyed by development and monocrop farming, making it increasingly hard to find sustenance along the way.
I’m guessing however that my stalker was an Eastern Tiger Swallowtail (family Papilionidae in the order Lepidoptera), but if not then my next best guess would be an Admiral. Unfortunately the creature’s freakish attentions alarmed me so much that I didn’t take time to examine its colours and patterns. Obviously I’ll never make a decent lepidopterist. But for anyone who wants to be one, I have a tip: wear red to attract specimens.
Barbara Julian is a local writer and nature enthusiast who writes monthly about the various species making their home in Oak Bay.