Rare butterfly is winging back

Amid surfers and skaters, a tiny blue butterfly has scored a telling victory in its fight against extinction.

The rare El Segundo blue has returned to two popular beaches southwest of Los Angeles where it has not been seen in decades.

This is no mere academic sighting of a rare species.

Scientists say they are surprised at the resurgence. Dozens of the rare butterflies are thriving, not in some rarefied fenced-off reserve but in public view at county beaches in Redondo Beach and Torrance.

"You could open the car door, and they could hit you in the face," said conservation expert Travis Longcore this weekend, gesturing at creatures no bigger than a thumbnail flitting a few feet away from parked SUVs.

In a month that has marked the delisting of the American bald eagle as an endangered species, news of the tiny butterfly's reappearance is stirring hope that other species will rebound as unexpectedly and publicly as this one.

The El Segundo blue, one of the region's best-known endangered species, is found nowhere in the world but the southeastern shores of Santa Monica Bay.

Scientists staved off its extinction for years by nursing or monitoring it at three sites off-limits to the public at Los Angeles International Airport, the Chevron El Segundo refinery and on private land in Torrance. They estimate the current population remains low -- only in the tens of thousands -- with the largest group at LAX.

Now, the butterflies seem to be declaring independence.

They forged ahead on their own to reach new native vegetation at the two beaches. There they are mating and feasting on the buckwheat nectar they crave.

That proved wrong the biologists who called the species too sedentary to fly long distances.

"They were so, 'It's not going to happen,' " recalled Monica Acosta, a horticulturalist and coordinator with the Los Angeles Conservation Corps. Then, three weeks ago, she visited the Redondo Beach site where corps workers recently added native plants.

Something moved amid the shrubs.

"That's when I noticed this little blue flicker," she said. She snapped some photos and turned them over to butterfly experts to study. (Although the upper side of the butterfly's wing has the distinctive blue, the underside is mostly gray with spots.)

Two days later, it happened again.

"We took a walk to the Torrance site, and we saw them there too," Acosta said, "and we said, 'Wow, this has got to mean something.' "