Beach Report 11/24/24 - The Buffies are Back!

The first thing we saw when we got out of the car at the parking lot was a small raft of Bufflehead ducks bobbing around the south jetty. I think I saw them a couple of days ago but my phone pictures were inconclusive, so I brought the camera with the long lens today. 

Butterfly season is all but over, but this slightly worse for wear Common Buckeye was still soaking up the sun in the dunes. 

A gorgeous fall day, sunny, still, and with temperatures in the upper 50s.

The tide was on it's way down, but not very low, and the beach was not particularly forthcoming with shark's teeth, only 10 teeth between us.

A Bald Eagle looking out on the Bay from atop a tree atop the Cliff at Matoaka. Probably longing for the good old days a month ago when there were Ospreys to rob and eagerly awaiting their return. 

Beach Report 9/8/24

Definitely a fallish day, with temperatures in the low 60 under mostly blue skies. A bit of north wind initially, but that mostly died over the course of the walk.

One of the local Great Blue Heron's hoping I'll walk by without breaking his concentration on fishing. We worked it out. 

I haven't done much with butterflies this year, but this one is worthy, a Viceroy, a Monarch mimic (or maybe they mimic each other) in the Kudzu, which, by the way is blooming, and making a delightful grape soda smell.

The best of 13 teeth, a nice Lemon Shark.

.Beach Report 11/17/23

After a series of fairly raw days, with high tides and wind, we finally got a really nice mid-November day, 60+ F, partly cloudy, and only slightly breezy. When we arrived I was pleasantly surprised to find this Common Buckeye butterfly fliting around in the dunes.

Georgia stay with Gabi to play in the sand on Long Beach, while Skye and I went up the beach, and managed to get all the way up above the "big tree."

Georgia outscored me in sheer numbers, 14 teeth to my 12, but I also found a couple of Sting Ray chevrons, and this very nice lower White Shark tooth.

Beach Report 8/12/23

It was hot today, with the thermometer showing low 90s at home, and the Cove Point site shows mid 80s, with a 15 kt wind out of the east

Not a great day for fossils, Georgia and I each got three teeth, although I admit, her's were generally better than mine.

Skye getting her drink and cooling rest at the Calvert Beach stream.

Nearby, an Eastern Tiger Swallowtail  male getting a sip from wet sand.

Beach Report 6/9/23

Today was moderately warm, in the mid 60s, with overcast most of the time, and even a short rain shower. We hit the low tide just about right, and walked all the way up to where the boulders fell.

Georgia showing off her find of the day/year, a tooth so big it wouldn't go all the way into her tooth jar.

A sadly unfocused shot showing the 1 7/8 inch White Shark tooth she found up on the dry side. Easily the biggest of the year so far, and in great shape, too. She also found a pretty nice Geoduck pearl. Otherwise, a horrible day for fossils, only 4 more teeth. 

A least the focus shows Skye is getting along up the beach.

A little Azure (Spring or Summer?) which stopped on log nearby. 

Bombs for Butterflies

Bay Journal, Rare butterflies find refuge thanks to explosions at Pennsylvania training base

t’s the most unlikely of after-effects: Bombing, exploding grenades, artillery fire and dirt-churning tank maneuvers at Pennsylvania’s Fort Indiantown Gap have produced grassland habitat that’s ideal for the last notable population of beautiful and rare regal fritillary butterflies in the Eastern U.S.
. . .
Lucky visitors get to walk among the butterflies that have been described as “monarchs dipped in chocolate.” Their forewings are bright red-orange, similar to monarchs. But their hindwings are darker, and the undersides of the hindwings are black with a striking array of white spots.

Regal fritillaries are vanishing or declining in much of their range. And Fort Indiantown Gap is the only place in the Eastern U.S. where you are likely to see them.

The undulating fields on a former farm are a medley of grasses and wildflowers that thrive on fires and newly disturbed earth. The 17,000-acre base includes five of these fields, totaling about 250 acres spread over 7 miles, that are intensely managed to coddle regals. But the butterflies also heavily use another 2,000 or so acres of training and firing ranges that are constantly pulverized and occasionally catch fire and burn.

“It actually gets a little beat up. What we don’t want is for the field to turn into a bunch of trees,” Swartz said.

These early successional fields harbor the plants, flowers and grasses needed by regals in their three growth phases. The caterpillars feed on arrowhead violets and other plants. In winter, when the caterpillars are still only the size of a grain of rice, they hunker down in welcoming microclimates provided by a variety of grasses such as little bluestem. Adult butterflies need nectar plants such as field thistle, milkweed and bee balm to survive.

Regal fritillaries are listed as critically imperiled in Pennsylvania, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is soon expected to announce its decision on a petition by scientists to declare eastern fritillaries threatened or endangered and thus get federal protection.

Sightings of regals at the site go back to 1958, when a famous moth field guide author was stationed there. But it was not until the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources did a flora survey in the 1990s that the rare species became more widely known to scientists.

That observation led to a federal environmental impact statement and the adoption of a conservation plan to protect the butterflies at the fort. When the military proposed a new firing range in regal habitat in the mid-1990s, the North American Butterfly Association filed a lawsuit to stop it.

As a result, more formal conservation and protection protocols were drawn up, including a staff of wildlife biologists who are now stationed at the base for ongoing studies and to doctor habitat that regals find ideal. Invasive plants are pulled out by hand.

Prescribed burns are also part of the regimen. Usually, they are set intentionally, though live ammunition triggers others. Fortunately, adult regals fly away and caterpillars seem to survive, though Swartz said scientists aren’t sure how.

We have at least two fritillaries in our area, the Great Spangled Fritillary, the Variegated Fritillary, and the possibility to two more, the Gulf and Meadow Fritillaries. For what it's worth, it's not all that clear to me  what distinguishes fritillaries from other butterflies, but there are strong similarities in the patterns of the species called fritillaries. 

Beach Report 8/25/22

Today, it's rather humid, mostly overcast and very still, so 85 F feels a little warm.

Georgia found this remarkable piece of blue glass. I don't we've ever seen quite that shade, and it's very rounded and "anti-polished."

Tooth hunting was OK at best, a total of 13 teeth, including this parasymphyseal Snaggletooth upper, and a piece of sting ray barb.

This female black morph Eastern Tiger Swallowtail was taking a break on the cliff side as I walked by.

Beach Report 6/17/22 - Hot

A hot one hear today. This is the thermometer at home, but according to Cove Point, this was about what it was like at the beach.

We were watching Gabi today, so we decided to bundle up the kid and the dog and drive to a shady place to park close to the stream that she likes to play in.

She loves the Bay. I'm glad the Sea Nettles aren't here yet, but it could happen any day now. 

Skye and I walked down the beach to Matoaka, while I looked for fossils, and Skye begged for pets. I think she got more than I got shark's teeth (8).

This Zebra Swallowtail was puddling near the stream

After I finished walking Skye, it was time to go home and wash off.

Monarchs, Endangered or Not?

At Delmarva Now,Monarch butterflies move closer to Endangered Species Protection

Although they will have to wait till 2024, monarch butterflies are slated for a decision by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on receiving endangered or threatened species protection.

On account of pesticide spraying, habitat loss and climate change, monarch butterfly populations have decreased 85%.

The population is below the threshold at which government scientists estimate the butterfly migrations could collapse. The Center for Biological Diversity, along with the Center for Food Safety, petitioned for protection of the butterflies Aug. 26, 2014.

“The Service’s slow, bureaucratic process for listing species has tragic consequences, like further declines, more difficult recoveries and sometimes even extinction,” said Noah Greenwald, endangered species director at the center. "We’re in an extinction crisis, and scientists are warning of the impending loss of more than a million species. We need a Fish and Wildlife Service that does its job and acts with urgency.” 

But some evidence suggests that Monarchs are actually rebounding, from Kip Hansen at WUWT, 2022 Monarch Butterfly Update

This last March, I reported on these digital pages the marvelous and mysterious news that the census of the Western Monarch annual migration in California had shown an increase in overwintering monarchs by 100 times over the previous year. The expert consensus had been that the Western migration would be shown to be extinct.

But Nature does not always listen to the experts and just does what it does.

“The butterflies hit a devastating record low last year [2020-2021], numbering fewer than 2,000 across California.” …. “We were pretty concerned last year that we were potentially facing a reality where there would no longer be monarch butterflies in the Western US,” Sarina Jepsen, director of the endangered species program at the Xerces Society” [ source ]

That statement from Sarina Jepsen is probably a misquote – no one thinks that the Monarch Butterfly (Danaus plexippus) is going extinct in the Western U.S.. The fear is that the natural phenomena called the Western Monarch Migration will cease. “…in 1983, the IUCN took the unprecedented step of creating a new category in the Invertebrate Red Data Book, in order to list the monarch migration as a Threatened Phenomenon. This is because the numbers of American migrants are falling sharply.” [ source ]

This last March I reported that due to the Covid pandemic (probably) the usual annual census of overwintering Monarchs in Mexico had either not been completed or had not been reported. Now, at last, the WWF, in conjunction and partnership with . . . the Secretariat of Environment and Natural Resources (Mexico), the National Commission of Natural Protected Areas (Conanp), the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve, World Wildlife Federation, and the TELMEX Foundation. has finally, issued the annual report as a four-page .pdf file.

 

Monarch experts are not in agreement about what has caused either the near-disastrous low of 2013-2014 or the recent improvements. Most agree on the major culprit for the population decline since the 1990s – changes in agricultural practices, including the use of Roundup-type herbicides which greatly reduced the incidence of milkweed among field crops, like corn, and began to be used to eliminate roadside weeds in addition to the usual mowing. The aggregate effect on milkweed populations, necessary food for monarch caterpillars, can be seen in the monarch migration numbers. This is known as the “milkweed limitation hypothesis.”

Chip Taylor, director of Monarch Watch, recently completed a study that found that numbers of monarchs overwintering in central Mexico is directly tied to the size of the summer population in the U.S. Midwest.

Published Aug. 7 in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, the researchers show that the decline in the monarchs’ overwintering numbers is not due to an increase in the deaths of monarchs during the migration — the “migration mortality hypothesis.” The main determinant of yearly variation in overwintering population size, they found, is the size of the summer population.

The “migration mortality hypothesis” has been heavily promoted in Science and Scientific American. This hypothesis aligns well with the narratives of Climate Change advocacy and goes like this: “changes in the climate are causing bad weather during critical monarch migrations time windows with more damaging storms, droughts, high winds and climbing temperatures.” However, Chip Taylor and his colleagues found:

“Showing the migration mortality hypothesis advocates their assumptions were wrong took awhile since that required a significant effort to vet our monarch tagging database for accuracy and to analyze the data,” Taylor said. “Dealing with 1.4 million records is no simple task.”

“In contrast to the predictions of the migration mortality advocates, the tagging recoveries — a measure of migration success — did not decrease over time, the researchers found.”

“In addition, the number tagged each year was correlated with the size of the overwintering population in Mexico, consistent with the milkweed limitation hypothesis. The tagging also confirmed that the majority of monarchs reaching the overwintering sites originated from the Upper Midwest.” [ source ]

The Monarch Watch study reinforces the need to restore milkweed to its original range and numbers. Restore milkweed, restore the monarchs.

Monarchs have painted themselves into a corner by requiring milkweed for reproduction. This was a perfectly fine idea when milkweed grew almost literally “everywhere”. It is still widespread but not nearly in the numbers seen in earlier decades. In the American Mid-West, the milkweed that would be maturing in the vast cornfields never got past seedling stage due to Round-up Ready agriculture. In my area, roadsides and highway verges, where milkweed flourishes, are generally mowed down in the late summer coinciding with the exact time that the caterpillars that will become the migrating super-generation of monarchs are on the milkweed plants.

Monarchs have started to return to our area for the year. I saw my first on May 25. We have a fair amount of Milkweed along undeveloped property along roads, and in the dunes by the beach. I'm not particularly worried that we aren't contributing our fair share of monarchs.

I found it mildly amusing that the link to the article on the front page of WUWT actually shows the wrong butterfly, the picture they chose is actually a Viceroy, a Monarch mimic. (some people consider them members of a co-mimic group, where all the species with similar markings gain some protection from predators by virtue of poison and bad tastes. This is called Müllerian mimicry (no relation). There are other butterflies in the group, including the Queen. While Monarchs are quite common here in summer, the Viceroy seems to be quite rare, and the few I see are always in the same place.

Good News on the Monarchs

The butterflies, not the British rulers. At WUWT, 2022 Monarch Butterfly Report: A Mystery

The magical marvelous Monarch Butterfly is surging – they are ramping up – populations numbers are skyrocketing! That is to say, according to Monarch censuses, the numbers of migrating Monarchs overwintering in both the Western Migration and the Eastern Migration have vastly improved over last year.

Monarch butterflies (Danaus plexippus) and their annual North American migration represent one of the mysteries of the animal kingdom, with their so-far inexplicable ability to produce one generation each year capable of traveling up to 2,500 miles and then, even after such a long journey for such a small insect, overwintering, without any eating, until Spring, at which time they fly north again eating and mating along the way.

Monarchs feed on flower nectar, like other butterflies, but in order to breed, they require milkweed plants, on which they lay their eggs. Although milkweed is slightly poisonous, monarch caterpillars will only eat milkweed leaves. It is believed that changing agricultural practices to suppress weeds and the widespread mowing of highway verges has greatly reduced the available milkweed for monarchs and contributed to their declining numbers.

And this last winter?

The Western Migration (and see map above) showed a fabulous comeback. According to the Xerces Society, the western migration for the 2021-2022 season was a great success with upwards of 250,000 monarchs found overwintering known sites along the southern California coast from Monterey south to San Luis Obispo. Xerces says this is “an over 100-fold increase from the previous year’s total of less than 2,000 monarchs and the highest total since 2016.”

We went to see the Monarch overwintering in Pismo Beach many years ago. It was pretty awesome. A grove of Eucalyptus trees (note, non native), literally covered with Monarchs and shimmering as they moved. 

How can this be so? No one is really sure. For any closely watched annual natural phenomena to increase by 100 times in a single year is more than a little unusual.

However, it is not strange at all to those who are familiar with real-world population dynamics. It is possible that the Western Monarch population may be acting like an “island species” in which local abundance or scarcity of sources and intra-species competition control species population size. In these conditions, the mathematical formulas of population dynamics show definite chaotic features, including population crashes and booms (see the graphic of May Island Squirrel Population). The actuality of this type of chaotic behavior has been confirmed in the natural world many times.

Monarchs, however, are capable of living year-around in the southern parts of California and the northern parts of Mexico and are found quite commonly living and breeding at all times of the year. This means that not all the monarch west of the Rockies take part in the annual migration. Many just do what humans often do, they move to southern California for the winter and get on with their normal lives. For monarch, that means mating, laying eggs, dying, and the new generation hatches as caterpillars which eat milkweed and pupate to become new monarchs. Tagging efforts have shown that some few Western Monarchs may even migrate to the same sites in Central Mexico as the Eastern Monarchs.

Extinction fears for the Western Monarch are not about a real extinction of Monarch butterflies west of the Rocky Mountains, but rather the fear that the Western Monarch Migration will cease to exist: “…in 1983, the IUCN took the unprecedented step of creating a new category in the Invertebrate Red Data Book, in order to list the monarch migration as a Threatened Phenomenon. This is because the numbers of American migrants are falling sharply. Figures for 1997-2016 show a 74 percent decline in California’s overwintering monarchs.” And last year, the numbers for the western migration were vanishing small….almost nonexistent.

But what about the Eastern Migration, the butterflies that we see commonly? 

The usual sources of census data for the Eastern Monarch Migration have been silent the last 2 years – figures are usually published in February by Mexico’s CONANP – Comisión National de Áreas Naturales Protegidas. Last year there was not official announcement (that I could find). The Monarch Sanctuaries in Mexico were officially closed to visitors because of Covid. I am not sure how this prevented the rangers and researchers from performing their usual census, but either they did not do so, or it is running late.

The latest population data for the eastern migration is from the winter of 2019-2020:

I am attempting to get an official number for the 2020-2021 season – but have had no luck so far. The best I have found is a comment made by Monarch Watch’s Chip Taylor in his post on the 6th January 2022:

 

“Last year my estimate for the hectare total was almost spot on – 2.0 hectares vs a measured 2.01 hectares. It was more of a guess than a data-based prediction, but I’ll take credit for being close. There are reasons to think I will be close again this year and other reasons to predict that the number will be higher.” (said while predicting another drop in population for 2021-2022).

I have information from local Monarch researchers in Mexico who report that CONANP may release a census soon (it has not as of 20 March 2022).

I can only offer this good news from an eye-witness account:

“But in our estimation, in the Cerro Pelón Sanctuary, there was doubling of the butterflies from last season.” (personal communication — paraphrased for language differences)

I would be guardedly optimistic about their population. From personal observation, Monarchs seemed a little less common here over the last couple years than they had before.  

For what it's worth, "butterfly season" has started in Southern Maryland, I've identified 3 species so far, all three relatively cold tolerant species, but as our weather starts to warm more, I expect more shortly.

Beach Report 3/7/21

As promised, today was even warmer than yesterday, 77 F, under glowering skies that promise a storm later this afternoon, and with a stiff wind from the SSE, the doesn't really make much trouble at beach, except near gaps in the cliffs.

It was a good low tide, and we managed a decent count, 24 teeth. Georgia had one good Snaggletooth, mine were all pretty ordinary jar fillers.

The surprise of the day was this butterfly, a Mourning Cloak (aka Camberwell Beauty in England). The first butterfly for me this year, though Georgia saw the ubiquitous Spring Azure this morning too), it was pretty tattered, suggesting it might be a overwintering adult:

Overwintered adults mate in the spring, the males perching in sunny openings during the afternoon to wait for receptive females. Eggs are laid in groups circling twigs of the host plant. Caterpillars live in a communal web and feed together on young leaves, then pupate and emerge as adults in June or July. After feeding briefly, the adults estivate until fall, when they re-emerge to feed and store energy for hibernation.

10/14/21 Beach Report

It's starting to get a little late in the year for butterflies, but in a patch of asters on the way down to the beach with sky, I found this Pearl Crescent . . .

and in some grass beside the harbor, this Common Buckeye.

About as nice a day as one could hope for, 70 F, blue skies. If I had one complaint, it would be the north wind was a little stiff, and muddied up the water, and made it hard to look for fossils.

There was a lot of leaf and wood debris piled up in the weather side of the jetty.

We still managed 14 teeth, of which this big, broken Snaggletooth was the biggest disappointment. I'm going to take Paul's lead, and call it "bite damage" and consider is special

There was still at least one Osprey still around. I saw some eagles at a distance. 

Amidst the debris on the beach there were many discarded Horseshoe Crab shells. They appear to undergo a mass molt in the fall.