What seemed to nature photographer Carol Freeman to be a sick monarch butterfly recently flying in an odd pattern over prairie flowers at the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe turned out to be a “once-in-a- lifetime” thrill reserved (we all should hope) only for her.
The butterfly she saw was a non-native species called the queen butterfly (Danaus galippus), a close relative of the monarch butterfly, but one that lives in the far southern climates of this country and never migrates.
The only other recorded sighting of one in Illinois was in Palos Park on Sept. 9, 1928.
Finding something that rare is probably as close to nirvana as a butterfly enthusiast like Freeman can get.
But beyond the immediate curiosity, such a sighting, combined with the appearance of several other non-native butterflies this year, intrigues scientists who study the distribution of species, ever vigilant to the idea that unexpected visitors could be signaling otherwise invisible ecological shifts.
Whether Freeman’s queen butterfly got here on its own– or is the product of happenstance or some lepidopterological hitchhiking–probably never will be determined. But scientists say a cluster of such sightings might be a potential barometer of global warming, a change in the planet’s temperature that could modulate formerly inhospitable habitats but also wreak havoc with the earth’s biological systems.
“That’s pretty remarkable. That’s a very unusual sighting,” said Chris Dietrich, an entomologist for the Illinois Natural History Survey in Champaign. Dietrich studies invasions of non-native insects into Illinois.
Doug Taron, curator of biology at the Chicago Academy of Sciences and leader of the Illinois Butterfly Monitoring Network, agrees. He confirmed last week from the photos Freeman took that it was a queen butterfly and found the reference to the 1928 Palos Hills sighting of one in the Annotated Checklist of the Butterflies of Illinois.
More Top Picks Best Agar Agar Kits For Cooking
“I can’t deny a bit of envy that I didn’t get to witness this occurrence,” said Taron, who has loved and studied butterflies since he was 6. He supervises the captive breeding of rare and endangered Illinois butterfly species for the Academy’s new Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum, which will open this fall in Lincoln Park. The likelihood of anybody else seeing the one Freeman spotted or any other of its kind are about zero, he said.
“I certainly don’t expect to see one in Cook County in my lifetime,” he said. “If I did, you did, and a lot of people around Chicago did over the next couple of years, that would mean something is happening to change this butterfly’s range. That would be a significant change and one that might not be pleasant, like a warming climate.”
Freeman, 40, owner of an Evanston graphic design and photography business, spotted the queen butterfly late last Sunday afternoon in the Dixon Prairie display garden, at the Botanic Garden. She was making photographs of flowers and insects for her company’s nature picture archive.
“When I first saw it,” she said, “I thought it was just another monarch, but it had such a crazy flight pattern, I thought it was sick. I took a closer look and saw it had completely different, brownish coloring and patterns on its wings than a monarch’s, so I started following it around, photographing it.
“I have loved butterflies since I was a little girl, when I caught them in nets in the alley behind our house in Lincolnwood. This one, though, I had never seen before.”
The next day, she got out all of her field guides for butterflies, and the only thing she could find that resembled the one in the Botanic Garden prairie was the queen butterfly. A friend advised her to call Taron, who asked her to bring in the photos.
“I got to his office and he took one look at the slides and got pretty excited,” she said. ” `That’s it. You got it,’ he said. I was flabbergasted. It was a thrill of a lifetime.”
As rare as it is in Illinois, where it cannot survive cold weather, the queen butterfly is commonly seen in Florida, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California, he said. They are occasionally spotted as far north as Kansas.
“There are a couple of other things going on that make Carol’s queen butterfly sighting intriguing,” Taron said. “There has been an influx of other southern butterflies into Illinois this year too.”
One, the white M hairstreak, so-named because of white markings and hairlike tails streaming from its wings, “only gets up here (Chicago region) a couple of times in a century,” Taron said, “so they are just about as rare here as the queens.
“This summer there were two sightings of the white M that I can tell you were bombproof. I had my Butterfly Monitoring Network people out on a field trip at the Gensburg Markham Prairie June 20, and we saw one there. The next day I saw one by myself way up in the Bluff Spring Fen in Elgin.”
In addition, Taron said, there is another southern species, the buckeye butterfly, that usually migrates this far north every year, but not until mid- or late July. This year his monitoring network recorded it in early June and in much greater numbers than usual.
“We shouldn’t jump to conclusions with all of this,” Taron said. “It was a mild winter south of here, so some of these species may have survived the winter farther north than they normally do.”
With such sporadic sightings of species like the queen and white M hairstreak, it is impossible to know whether they got here on their own or by some freak occurrence, he said.
“There are aspects of this we may never know,” said Taron.
“Somebody in Texas may have had a queen caterpillar crawl under the fender of their car, where it pupated and rode to Illinois, emerging here as a butterfly. The one Carol photographed looked so fresh; its wings were obviously not ripped up from flying hundreds of miles. My guess is it came out of its chrysalis somewhere near here. It’s difficult to say how that butterfly got here.”
Taron’s butterfly-monitoring group of 60 enthusiasts does extensive field work to study how land management practices affect local native butterfly populations. Chris Dietrich at the Natural History Survey does the same work, but for the entire state, and watches insect populations aside from just butterflies.
“We don’t have any natural barriers, like mountain chains, to block the migration of southern insects into the state,” Dietrich said.
“Every year there seems to be something appearing up here that you don’t normally see. A lot of things just get blown up here with storm systems, so I don’t know how much we can speculate on the appearance of something being a sign of changing weather patterns.”
Unlike the amateur bird-watching masses who ably track wild bird populations, Dietrich said, there are not countless insect hobbyists marching around the state noting new insects. So a lot of rare insects probably come and go unobserved.
“It just may be dumb luck that somebody spots one of these really out-of-place things like a queen butterfly. Whether that means global warming is happening is a bit of a stretch, unless we saw lots of them up here for four or five years in a row.
“Then we might have some cause to worry that something strange is happening to our climate.”
Certainly Freeman credits luck with her queen butterfly sighting.
“For anybody who has any knowledge of birds, bugs or butterflies, this is what they live for, seeing something rare like this,” she said. “I really just got lucky.
More Top Picks Pliers Set
“If I had known what it was I probably wouldn’t have been able to hold the camera still and never have gotten a photograph to show I had actually seen one.”