Bevy of blues emerges in a breeding frenzy

Hidden by the darkness of a half-moon sky, nine students and their biologist mentor waded through waist-high brush one night last week, hunting for yellow-flowering deer weed to shelter one of the rarest butterflies in America.

One student hugged a big, red cylindrical cooler. "I come bearing endangered species," she said.

It was no joke. Inside the cooler fluttered dozens of Palos Verdes blues, thumbnail-sized butterflies, all bred in captivity, most just a few days old.

The biologists' mission on a Palos Verdes Peninsula hill: Free the blues.

This was a rare moment in the race to save the federally protected butterfly, which hovered near extinction two years ago. Now, government officials have an unexpected problem on their hands. Their breeding program has been so successful that there are too many butterflies and not enough federally approved sites where they can be released.

Last spring, an estimated 220 of the species existed in the wild, so few that experts feared they could be wiped out by a single hillside brush fire.

Yet in the last 12 days, 2,400 blues -- three times more than forecast -- have emerged at a laboratory housed at Moorpark College.

As a result, federal wildlife officials are scrambling to identify more sites on the Palos Verdes Peninsula to release the rare butterfly. But with a life span of only three to 38 days, hundreds of the butterflies may die in captivity.

"We've accommodated what we can with the areas that are currently available," said Jane Hendron, spokeswoman for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, charged with protecting endangered species. "They may not all get a chance to live in the wild."

Biologists can't simply release the butterflies in any nice-looking garden or park. This is a federally protected species, after all, and there are regulations to follow. Also, landowners must be willing to accept the butterflies with all their protections. Permits can take months. Officials fear publicity could attract butterfly poachers.

Even if far fewer butterflies had emerged this year, federal officials initially had no landowners permitted and willing to take them.

So when a coastal bluff was approved for a release last week, scientist Jana Johnson met her students in a kind of undercover biological mission.