Butterflies

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.

A visit to the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History was the last place I expected to be picked up by a stranger. It was a brief relationship. Ultimately, a fly-by-night kind of thing, although it happened at 11 a.m. The scene of the tryst was the ongoing "Butterflies and Plants: Partners in Evolution" exhibition set in the new $3-million Butterfly Pavilion on the museum's second floor.

The heat lamps have been blazing for half an hour in Jana Johnson's laboratory, orange light flooding over a sea of plastic cups. Johnson hovers, waiting for metamorphosis. She points at a brown pod in one of the cups. "Look at the seams. This one is ready to pop," she says. The seam widens. A sliver of gray wing appears. "Go. Go. Go," she cajoles. "You can do it. Go."

Brent Karner likes to think of butterflies as a lure, a way to capture the public imagination. If he can use swallowtails and mourning cloaks to draw people into his net-walled pavilion, he says, maybe he can pique their interest in less lovable insects. Grasshoppers, perhaps. Even termites. One might call it a case of entomological bait and switch. "They're the one group of bugs that people really like," Karner said of butterflies. "They speak for the cockroaches."

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.

There's a new bug in the garden, and it looks a lot like bird poop. Unappetizing, you bet, but so clever: This odd little caterpillar's job is to avoid being eaten, and one day -- like magic -- become a giant swallowtail butterfly. Even in one of the driest years on record and an "awful" one for butterflies, according to Fred Heath, author of "An Introduction to Southern California Butterflies," giant swallowtails are fairly easy to spot, particularly in neighborhoods where citrus is common.

WASHINGTON -- The gray dome that will be the spa-like home to a swirl of live butterflies at the National Museum of Natural History is almost complete. But the fluttery scientific attraction, "Butterflies and Plants: Partners in Evolution," which had been expected to open next month, has been postponed. The delay was caused mainly by the start of the museum's project to replace old windows, some of which date from 1907.

Inow know what it feels like to be inside a snow globe. But instead of fake, swirling white snowflakes, substitute butterflies -- hundreds, thousands, millions of orange-and-black monarchs -- flying around like autumn leaves in a gale. Then, you can envision the scene at the Santuario de la Mariposa Monarca (Monarch Butterfly Sanctuary) near Morelia. Each fall, 150 million of the butterflies set off from the northern United States for the highlands east of Morelia.

Police raided 19 clandestine sawmills near a threatened nature reserve where Monarch butterflies nest in the winter, arresting 56 people and confiscating enough illegally logged wood to fill 600 heavy trucks, the government said Thursday. About 700 police and environmental agents detained mill workers, lumberjacks, truck drivers and others, said Augusto Cabrera, a spokesman for the attorney general for environmental protection.

The number of butterflies migrating through California has fallen to nearly a 40-year low as populations already hurt by habitat loss and climate change encountered a cold, wet spring, researchers said. "Some of them were already in decline, but this weather really added insult to injury, kicking them when they were down," said Arthur Shapiro, a UC Davis entomologist.