Accepting lifts from shifty Californian dope growers and bluffing gun-toting South Americans is not quite the life you would expect one of the world’s top lepidopterists to lead. But Arthur Shapiro takes it in his stride. As he tells Michael Bond, tracking butterflies for over three decades has left him far more concerned for their fate than his own.
What’s changed that makes you worry?
For the past 35 years, walking a predetermined, identical route every two weeks, I’ve been recording the species at our 10 survey sites on a transect across California, from the San Francisco Bay Area to the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada mountains. Initially I didn’t count individuals, mainly because the number of species made that impossible. Since 1999 I’ve been able to count individuals at some sites because many species have plummeted to the point where it has become feasible. Other species have become extinct regionally.
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Is that because of climate change?
It appears to be, though our initial analysis suggests it is not due to climate alone. We have evidence that a significant number of species are shifting their ranges uphill. We’re also seeing species emerge earlier. Each year, I offer a pitcher of beer to the person who spots the first cabbage white to emerge in Yolo, Solano and Sacramento counties. I usually win. This year it happened on 23 January, which is relatively late. On average the species appears up to 19 days earlier than it did 36 years ago.
Are we losing species?
I think what’s most troubling is that we are losing populations of established, reliable species – those that breed in people’s vegetable gardens. It’s like discovering that cockroaches are becoming extinct in cities.
How do you set about catching a butterfly?
Normally with a net. You can catch them by hand if you have to. Earlier this week I picked up a Gulf fritillary, which breeds only on passion flowers, in my fingers. I picked one off as I was walking around. I can predict butterflies’ behaviour fairly well. When my wife and I went to Colombia in 1977 to study a high-elevation butterfly only a handful of people had seen alive, I was able to catch them with uncanny accuracy because they are closely related to a butterfly I knew well.
You’ve done a lot of work in South America. How do you live when you are in the field there?
Very casually and very cheaply. Sometimes I camp. I generally travel by bus, which is easy in Latin America. I have got into the routine of staying at the very cheap places where the long-haul bus and truck drivers stay for $2 or $3 a night in bunk beds – bring your own toilet paper. I’m on the move most of the time: I’m trying to document the geographic distribution of certain groups of butterflies to understand how they evolved, so there’s no need to linger in one place.
Do you meet butterfly enthusiasts on the road?
It surprises me that I don’t meet more. I do meet some local enthusiasts, like the retired police chief in suburban Buenos Aires, who has opened a butterfly museum with private funding. I carry my life membership card for the society he founded. I also occasionally bump into other foreign researchers, like the time I arrived late one evening in the town of Esquel in Argentinian Patagonia. I knew there was a cheap hotel near the bus station. When I went to check in, there were some real tough-looking guys shooting pool in the lobby and drinking beer. I was carrying a butterfly net and I thought I could get into trouble here. So I walked to the next cheapest hotel. When I looked at the guest list I saw an old colleague of mine, the former director of the American Museum of Natural History’s south-western research station in Arizona, had checked in. He and his wife were there collecting spiders.
Have you got into real trouble in South America?
Oh yes. One time I accidentally trespassed within the boundary of a nuclear facility. I was quickly surrounded by people with weapons. For situations like that I have a standard spiel about what I’m doing. I pointed out to the people interrogating me that the boundary was not clearly marked, it was just a barbed wire fence. In Latin America people climb over barbed wire fences all the time. Their eventual reaction was: “He’s a harmless nut.”
Has butterfly hunting got you into trouble in the US too?
Yes, even worse than in the south. I’ve had to deal with addled methamphetamine freaks and pot growers with side arms. When you poke around in remote areas you find all kinds of things, like people growing dope on public land. One time a colleague and I were rescued by a pot farmer in California’s pot-growing triangle in the north-west when our pick-up got stuck in mud. He apologised for having to stop to, as he put it, “go tend my felonies”.
How did you first become interested in butterflies?
My parents did not have the happiest of marriages: it was a long one, but a case of “for every sadist there is a masochist”. So I stayed outdoors as much as I could, dabbling in everything – rocks, wild flowers, reptiles and amphibians. Gradually I narrowed it down to insects and then butterflies. Butterflies started to interest me around the age of 10 or 11.
Did you ever consider any other career?
As a kid, I thought of becoming a meteorologist. I’ve retained it as a hobby – my interests have remained fixated at juvenile stages throughout the decades. Given the convergence of the two topics in my research programme, it’s worked out pretty well.
How have they converged?
The butterfly monitoring programme I’ve been running in California since 1972 means I have collected around 83,000 individual records of 159 butterfly species and subspecies at these sites, which in terms of data is second only to the UK monitoring programme. We have also collated monthly climate records from weather stations along the transect. I’m interested in relating the life cycle of butterflies to various elements of climate. Concern about global climate change is growing exponentially, and I am sitting on one of the biggest and most relevant sets of data on the planet.
Would you say butterflies are intelligent?
They’re definitely capable of learning. There is a nearly forgotten 19th-century anecdote about a man who was raising tortoiseshell butterflies. He was in the habit of bringing a tray of moist gravel for them to drink. He did this at the same time every day. One day he was a little late and was flabbergasted to see the butterflies milling round the door waiting for him.
“Butterflies are definitely capable of learning”
Butterfly hunters have a certain image. What do people make of you?
From my appearance, people tend to judge things about my lifestyle, cultural preferences and so forth that may not be valid. I like confounding them. For example, people are often flabbergasted to hear that I’ve been a registered Republican my entire voting life. They rarely ask why. The reason is when I was growing up in Philadelphia, the local Democratic government was corrupt and being a Republican was progressive.
Profile
Arthur Shapiro started recording the effects of climate on butterflies as a teenager in Philadelphia. He is now a leading expert, and professor of evolution and ecology at the University of California, Davis. He is also known for his detailed amateur weather forecasts. His Field Guide to the Butterflies of San Francisco Bay and the Sacramento Valley Regions, co-authored with Timothy D. Manolis, will be published in June by the University of California Press.
