It’s a tough job, counting butterflies, but someone has to do it. Apparently, a bunch of folks from the area are interested in doing this tough job, as 12 lepidopterists (or, probably more accurate for most of these folks, lepidopterist-wanna-be’s) spent a warm Saturday morning in early July searching for and counting lepidopterans (butterflies, moths and skippers).

Tough, you ask? Well, when you get about two and a quarter seconds to see the details of a couple of 1 1/2 inch flapping wings as they flutter by in the back-and-forth way that a butterfly flies, yes, it can be a little tough. (“Did you notice the wings’dark edges?” “Yeah, right!”). But Mark Yaeger, also known as Radeaux, a well-known and fabulous artist who has several years experience identifying butterflies, was an excellent leader on this first butterfly count in Pueblo Mountain Park. Of course, butterflies also land, and the large lens and quick digital photography skills of Clif Smith caught many of these landed butterflies with his camera, which added greatly to the often tricky task of deciding between, say, a dun skipper and an orange-headed roadside skipper (it was a dun skipper).

The day started out slowly, and after the first 30 minutes or so, we had seen a total of zero butterflies. Might this be the first and last butterfly count in Pueblo Mountain Park, we joked. But as the day warmed, and we approached the pond just down the road from the MPEC, we saw and identified our first butterfly, a painted crescent. By around noon, after sauntering along the roads and a bit of the Devil’s Canyon Trail, a total of 25 species and 90 individual butterflies were counted.
For those of you who are interested in the details of the count’s results, here are the species, along with how many of each: Painted Crescent (3), Cabbage White (8), Aphrodite Fritillary (11), Two-tailed Swallowtail (4), Colorado Hairstreak (4), Orange Sulphur (9), Variegated Fritillary (1), Reakirt’s Blue (2), Gray Hairstreak (6), American Lady (4), Checkered Skipper (1), Taxile’s Skipper (9), Northern Crescent (2), Common Roadside Skipper (3), Rocky Mountain Duskywing (7), Dun Skipper (2), Common Wood Nymph (1), Pale Swallowtail (1), Weidemeyer’s Admiral (2), Pearl or Field Crescent (2), Melissa Blue (2), Black Swallowtail (2), Mourning Cloak (1), Checkered White (2), Banded Hairstreak (1). Many thanks to Donna Emmons for keeping track of the species and numbers.

Although butterflies were our primary focus, we also took notice of birds and flowers. Cordilleran flycatchers, violet-green sparrows and spotted towhees were the most numerous birds for the day. A male western tanager and a family of house wrens were noteworthy sightings. Many of the day’s participants were Audubon Society members and brought much birding experience to the outing. Wildflower highlights included butterfly weed, which was having a very good year in the park, and dogbane, both of which, we learned, are quite attractive to butterflies.

I know the park’s trees, many of its other plants, and I’m pretty good with its birds. And I notice butterflies, but, with few exceptions, I can not identify many of them. Well, after this enjoyable morning in July, I now know a few more. My plan is to acquire a field guide (there are several of them; Ken Kaufman’s Butterflies of North America is a good one), and begin learning the names of my butterfly neighbors – another way of enjoying Nature.