Shortly after the last rainstorm on March 22, they started appearing. One or two at a time at first, then three or four, then five or six… and before long, there were far too many to count. They are butterflies’mostly black, brown, and orange with some white spots on their wings and undersides of gray with white and red markings. And it is more than just coincidence that they were spotted all over Pacific Palisades last week. In fact, it was only natural. ‘I started seeing them on March 26 while driving to Northridge, then I saw them sporadically around town,’ said Ellen Marguiles, a Palisadian for almost 10 years. ‘Again while walking down Monument, on my way to the post office, I saw a few and then more and then there were hundreds! It was quite an amazing sight. Going home down Sunset, I was glad I wasn’t driving that fast, because the butterflies were flying into my car, but thankfully bounced gently off the hood.’ Weiping Xie, collections manager in the Entomology Department at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, experienced a similar phenomenon on his way to Death Valley that same weekend. Asked by the Palisadian-Post to comment on increased butterfly sightings throughout the Southland, Xie could not help but chuckle as he told his story: ‘I was driving along and all of a sudden they started hitting my windshield by the hundreds,’ he recalled. ‘It’s impossible to say how many there are but I think you could safely guess it’s in the millions. It’s also impossible to predict how long this current dispersal will last.’ The species of butterfly Marguiles and Xie encountered is called the painted lady (Vanessa cardui), also known as the ‘cosmopolitan butterfly’ because it is one of the most common butterflies in the world, living on every continent except Antarctica. And although ’emigrations’ of this type are not uncommon, those of this magnitude are’occuring only twice every decade’typically in the aftermath of heavy rains like the kind which drenched most of Southern California this winter. The record amount of rain and lush growth of wildflowers makes this mass butterfly emigration significantly greater than the last, which took place in 2001. ‘In wet years, the food supply in a given region will multiply, so when there are more flowers in bloom, butterflies are programmed to reproduce more,’ said local author Mathew Tekulsky, who published ‘The Butterfly Garden’ in 1985. ‘Naturally, when the species undergoes a massive population explosion, it has to expand to find more food supply.’ Tekulsky photographed the butterflies near his home in Sullivan Canyon last Thursday. ‘They came in groups at a time and this went on for hours,’ Tekulsky observed. ‘I watched them hovering in a lantana patch on Queensferry Road, just before the entrance to the nature trail. They were there all day long’from sunrise to sundown.’ Like most other butterflies, painted ladies live only a few weeks and thus go through several generations as they make their yearly flight north from Mexico. Traveling at speeds up to 20 miles per hour, they can cover up to 100 miles a day. Over the past several weeks, swarms of the butterflies have been reported from San Diego to Monterey. ‘You couldn’t miss them here for awhile’one day in particular they were just streaming in from everywhere,’ said Palisades garden designer Stephanie Blanc, who encountered the winged insects flitting around her garden. ‘But one thing I noticed was that the only flowers they landed on were California lilacs.’ According to Julian Donahue, curator of lepidoptera for 23 years at the County Natural History Museum before retiring in 1993, the painted lady actually feeds on a wide variety of plants. Unlike the migration of the monarch, which flies south to Mexico every fall and returns northeast every spring, the duration and volume of painted lady emigrations is hard to predict. Though the current emigration will likely continue for several weeks as the painted ladies make their way up to Oregon and possibly as far as Canada, it is unknown whether the butterflies will appear in large numbers again here as they did a week ago. ‘Their numbers can vary from day to day, hour to hour,’ Donahue said. While at Anza Borrego State Park in the Sonoran Desert recently, Marquez Knolls resident Margaret Huffman noticed millions of caterpillars’a clear sign of what was to come. ‘I figured when I got back home, the butterflies would be all over the place and they were,’ said Huffman, former president of the Los Angeles Chapter of the North American Butterfly Association and author of ‘Wild Heart of Los Angeles,’ a book about the Santa Monica Mountains. ‘But so far this week I haven’t seen anything. That’s just the way these things go.’ Adult painted ladies have a two to two-and-a-half-inch wingspan and sip sweet thistle and clover nectar. They can mate about a week after emerging. Nectar preferences of the species include thistle, dandelion, ironweed, daisy, zinnia, gayfeather and dahlia. Blanc recommended several sources for learning more about butterfly culture in the region, including Fred Heath’s book, ‘An Introduction to Southern California Butterflies.’ She also cited a poster called ‘Butterflies of Greater Los Angeles’ made by Rudi Mattoni, who is credited with rediscovering the El Segundo Blue Butterfly. For all who understand and appreciate the rarity of emigrations this size, the sight of thousands upon thousands of butterflies swarming about their favorite flowers is nothing short of breathtaking. ‘It’s wonderful to be able to stand there and just watch thousands of butterflies fly by all around you,’ Tekulsky said. ‘It’s a magical feeling. It really is.’ And only Mother Nature knows when he might get to experience it again.
