The scientists at the Washington State Department of Fish and Wildlife have successfully
reintroduced the endangered Taylor’s checkerspot butterfly into South Sound prairies,
specifically at the Scatter Creek Wildlife Area in Thurston County and Joint Base Lewis
McChord.
Biologists were out on one of the Scatter Creek sites near Rochester Wednesday counting
the number of the butterflies along survey lines and were pleased to see that “there werealmost too many to count,” said Mary Linders, endangered species recovery biologist forWDFW.

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In the past decade, WDFW has tripled the number of Taylor’s checkerspot butterflies in theSouth Sound prairies.
“No one has been able to do this successfully with this group of butterflies, so this is reallyexciting on a national scale,” Linders said.
Taylor’s checkerspot
butterfly is one ofabout 20 subspeciesof Edith’s checkerspot
butterfly, and is the
only one that has
successfully been
reintroduced to thewild.
The butterfly became
endangered due toloss of habitat fromthe advance ofinvasive plant species
like Scotch broom. So
the first method ofrestoring thesubspecies was torestore the prairies
themselves.
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Josh Cook, wildlife biologist for WDFW, specializes in prairie restoration and said WDFW
has a suite of treatments it does every year to help restore the habitat for Taylor’s
checkerspot butterflies.
“The easiest way to do it is to start with prescribed fire,” he said. “We’ll select areas that
could use a burn and that will open up a canvas, essentially, of landscape. Then theinvasive weeds will emerge first, once we get some precipitation. So we’ll herbicide thoseout, and that will give us the opportunity to select against them. A lot of the native plants will
emerge after that.”Those native plants are what the Taylor’s checkerspot butterfly needs to survive. These
plants include the blue camas and Indian paintbrushes found in the prairies.
“Over the course of the last 20 years, we’ve been working hard on restoring the habitat on
this prairie,” Linders said. “It used to be covered with scotch broom, five, six, seven feet tall.
We have gotten rid of that and are restoring a lot of the native prairie plants. These efforts
preserve a lot of the native nectar and host plants for the Taylor’s checkerspot butterfly, andalso for a whole suite of other species that are also very rare on these prairies.”
In 2007, WDFW officially started the program, testing the waters of this type of restoration
work. The larva were reared in captivity throughout their hibernation stage, before thecaterpillars could be released onto the prairies.

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Linders said it is important to note that researchers in the Bay Area of California havestudied a different subspecies of the same butterfly for 40 years, but have not been able toget the larva through the hibernation stage of the growth process. WDFW biologists havedone so in just over a decade of work.
“We started playing with smaller numbers,” Linders said. “We were captive rearing at theOregon Zoo, trying to figure out how to captive rear, just putting out a few hundred
caterpillars into the prairies at a time.”
The program also captive rears the larva at Mission Creek Corrections Center for Women inBelfair, Washington.
Over the years, as they pinpointed the exact life stage to release the caterpillars, biologists
at WDFW felt comfortable releasing them in progressively larger numbers.
During the five years that led up to 2013, WDFW released anywhere from 1,500 to 2,500
per year on prairie sites around the south sound area.
“We did our last release, for the most part, in 2013,” Linders said. “We did sort of one bumpup in 2016 because we were concerned about a big El Nino year that might take that
population back down. The numbers are quite precarious until they get into the thousands.”
The results have been better than anyone could have expected as she and others at
WDFW monitor the population growth with regular surveys, Linders said.
“Now for the last three years the numbers of adults have been building really quickly,” shesaid. “And so we are kind of seeing exponential growth in the population right now. We areprobably hitting maximum density, so we are kicking butterflies out into the surrounding
habitat, which is really exciting for us… They are shooting out all over the place.”
Taylor’s checkerspot butterfly is an integral part of the prairie system. Just as the prairies
support its life, it supports the life of the prairies. It is all a delicate balance, Linders said,
with plenty of problems to work through.
“We often look at a single species and say, ‘Why do we need that one?’” she said. “In thecase of these prairies, it’s not just one species that we are concerned about. In fact, one of
the things we are seeing with the restoration of the Taylor’s checkerspot is … it’s actuallycreating and maintaining habitat for a whole host of other birds, butterflies, rare plants.”
Linders said that this line of work is her calling and that she loves how these prairies are
why European settlers built here in the first place, and how they have historically been
integral to the way of life for many Native Americans.
Restoring the prairies, then, has become a priority in her life.
“I don’t know what else I would do,” Linders said. “I absolutely love what I do. It’s work thattakes passion and takes commitment. It’s something that really requires me to put all myphysical and mental capacities to try to solve these problems. This particular butterfly
seems to be too complex to research our way through these problems.”
Linders and company at WDFW have had to act and invest in the prairies to obtain theresults they have accomplished.
So be on the lookout for an orange and black butterfly in prairie land, because it’s a sightthat was seldom seen 10 years ago.

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