DECKERS, Colo.—The butterfly flitted through the air for a few seconds, then disappeared in the grass beneath a burnt tree. Chuck Miller, a zookeeper at Cheyenne Mountain Zoo, and Boyce Drummond, a Colorado College biology professor, waited in vain for a closer look.
“Where there’s one, there’s more,” said Miller hopefully.
Not on this day. Two hours of meticulous pacing on a barren hillside in the Pike National Forest revealed no other Pawnee montane skippers, a federally protected butterfly that lives nowhere else in the world but a 38-square-mile area along the South Platte River in Teller, Douglas, Park and Jefferson counties.
But knowing a skipper was there was good enough.
Six years ago, 50 percent of the skipper’s habitat had been wiped out by wildfires, including the 2002 Hayman fire, the largest in Colorado history. Some experts wondered if the butterfly, already listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, would recover.
Scientists get only a few weeks in late summer to study skipper numbers, and this year, they are seeing the most since the 2002 fire. For the first time, skippers are returning to the “high severity” burn areas, places where the fire destroyed all trees and vegetation.
It’s good news not only for the butterfly, but for all of this devastated landscape. Slowly, glacially, methodically, the hills are healing.
“We’re using it as sort of a canary in the coal mine, as an indicator of the health of a system,” said Drummond, who has been surveying skipper numbers here since 2000. “If a butterfly can live here, that means some component of the ecosystem is returning.”
Drummond first came to this spot, a few miles northwest of Cheesman Reservoir, in August 2002 to gauge the fire’s impact on skipper habitat. The blaze burned 138,000 acres and destroyed 133 homes.
“When I came out there in early August, right after the fire, the only thing you could see other than black char was the growing tips of yucca (plants),” Drummond said. “It was like a science fiction novel.
“At the time, it was hard to imagine anything was going to grow here again. It was so devastated.”
The skipper was already in decline, having lost much of its habitat to invasive weeds, mountain subdivisions and water projects, and it was designated threatened in 1987. Its presence derailed the Denver Water Board’s plans for the Two Forks dam and reservoir in 1990. Large wildfires in 1996 and 2000 also took their toll.
In the mid-1980s, scientists found two to three skippers per acre. The number was estimated at 80,000 to 140,000.
The year of the fire, researchers didn’t find a single one, even in unburned areas. They saw about 10 the next year.
The window to gauge skipper numbers is short. They emerge from cocoons in mid to late August, spend a few weeks mating, laying eggs and eating and die with the first major frost. To see them, conditions must be right—warm, sunny, without too much wind.
Drummond, whose $12,000-a-year research is funded by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the U.S. Forest Service, visits the same areas each year. The fieldwork involves pacing a predetermined distance and counting the number of plants and flowers skippers use for food and for laying eggs, gayfeather and blue grama, and counting skippers he sees.
The return of the skippers, in particular to the high-severity burn areas, coincides with a lushness seen throughout the Hayman area. Grasses, flowers and other plants have transformed the bleak moonscape, and Ponderosa pine saplings and burgeoning aspens show promise for the future. Native butterflies mean native plants are returning, encouraging signs.
Experts attribute the growth to a break in drought conditions that gripped the area for years.
The skipper’s recovery is not guaranteed. Drought could return, and in a fragile, fire-ravaged environment, there is always the possibility invasive insects and weeds could choke out the native plants it needs. Researchers this year are seeing skipper rates of 0.84 per acre, well below the pre-2002 average of 2.2, but much better than the 0.02 they found after Hayman.
Against the bleak backdrop of scorched hills and dead trees, a single butterfly means hope.
Said Drummond, “I don’t think any of us ever thought it would be completely extirpated, but we thought it would take many, many years to recover.”
The current research is funded year to year, and its goal is simply to count the number of skippers, not reintroduce them to areas. The Fish and Wildlife Service, which has authority over federally protected species, wants to see how skippers have recovered from the fire before taking action.
“We thought we might kind of breathe a little sigh of relief when they’re at least one per acre, and we wouldn’t need to do the surveys annually. But we’re not quite there yet,” said agency biologist Leslie Ellwood.
Success won’t be judged in the researchers’ lifetimes, but 100 years from now, when the forests are once again verdant and their most delicate and rare denizens can be seen sparkling orange in the afternoon sun.
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