Butterflies harder to spot in annual Florida counts

MIAMI — Every year when summer weather sizzles and the rest of south Florida heads inside, a dedicated crew of citizen scientists ventures into the buggy heat to do an increasingly difficult job: count butterflies.

For the past quarter of a century, the North American Butterfly Association has tallied the nation’s population of butterflies three times a year. The Fourth of July count is now underway in Florida and will last through July. But across the nation, and particularly in Florida, finding butterflies to count is getting more difficult as habitats continue to vanish and climate change makes butterflies brief lives ever more perilous.

“Every single day there are fewer butterflies in the United States than there were the day before. You don’t have to be a genius to figure it out,” said geneticist Jeffrey Glassberg, North American Butterfly Association’s president and founder.

Nowhere is that more evident than among more specialized butterflies, like the many imperiled in south Florida, that live on an ecological razor’s edge balanced between their dependency on particular plants and fragmented populations.

Of the 160 to 180 species found in Florida, about two dozen are in trouble, among the highest concentration of threatened butterflies in the United States. The impact of climate change — increased temperatures or sea rise that threaten host plants — may be driving them closer to the edge.

“Once upon a time I wasn’t happy unless we [counted] 50 species,” said wildlife biologist and butterfly expert Mark Salvato, who for the past 15 years has organized counts from Key West to Jacksonville. “Last year, I had 32.”

The count is modeled on the National Audubon Society’s popular Christmas Day Bird Count and started in the 1970s by the California-based Xerces Society, which works to protect pollinators. The North American Butterfly Association took over in 1993, a year after the organization was formed. The counts are organized around 15-mile-wide circles and are often conducted in the same Florida locations — Key West, Key Largo, Homestead or Coral Gables — to provide some consistency.

Linda Cooper, who drives from Orlando every year to help run counts in Key Largo and Homestead, said locations are selected for reliable habitat, meaning preserves, state parks or homes with well-tended butterfly gardens. So far this year, teams visited the old Orchid Jungle attraction at Hattie Bauer Hammock and Mary Krome Bird Preserve near Krome Avenue and Avocado Drive. Last weekend’s rain shut down counts around Coral Gables and the Deering Estate.

Because of its warm weather, south Florida has always been considered a mecca for rare butterflies. When an amethyst hairstreak, a rare tree-inhabiting bluish purple butterfly, turned up in Castellow Hammock Park near the Redland in 2004, it drew butterfly enthusiasts for days.

“You expect that with rare birds, but that was one of the first butterflies,” Salvato said.

The protection of butterflies has not always ended well, in part because what drives the creatures to extinction can sometimes be complicated. The Miami Blue once inhabited much of the south Florida coast but can now be consistently found only in the Marquesas, islands west of Key West.

In 2014, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service added two butterflies, the Bartram’s hairstreak and Florida leafwing, to the endangered species list. The listing designated critical habitat, with rules for maintaining it. But critics have often said the designation does little to protect the butterflies and their habitat on private land.

After the University of Miami sold the last large tract of pine rockland — the butterflies’ only habitat — to a Palm Beach County developer, the buyer quickly unveiled plans for a Wal-Mart shopping center and nearly 1,000 apartments. The service is now finalizing a conservation plan that carves the 90-acre forest into two 20-plus-acre preserves.

“The Schaus’ swallowtail has been listed for a long time, and it’s no better off,” Glassberg said. “People have this misguided but understandable view that if someone takes a meadow and puts in a parking lot, that the butterflies just move somewhere else. But that’s not true. The butterflies are removed from the planet. You’ve just decreased the population of the world’s butterflies.”

Tribune News Service/ROBERTO KOLTUN Butterfly enthusiasts look for specimens to count in late May in south Miami-Dade County. “People have to be pretty dedicated to stick with it,” said Linda Cooper (third from left), who just turned 76 and whose husband helped organize counts until his...