As I picked collard leaves, a large, yellow and black butterfly flew over my head into our silver maple tree, likely a native Western Tiger Swallowtail. If that’s what it was, it could well have laid an egg on a maple leaf. Butterflies transform tree and other plants’ leaves to make caterpillars and feed birds. Some caterpillars become butterflies, and some become the baby food parent birds search for. Moths and butterflies are key elements of the native ecosystem we can nurture in our yards.
On my collard leaves I have watched European Cabbage Whites lay eggs. European Cabbage Whites flutter plentifully around our gardens. The plain, green caterpillars eat kale, collards, and other brassicas, ingesting mustard glucosinolates, natural components of many pungent plants that make them distasteful to birds.
Here in the city, native butterflies rely on us for flowers for their nectar needs, native host plants such as lupines and mallows for their young, and undisturbed brush and leaves for their pupae. Last August, just north of Hollywood Library, I saw a native Gray Hairstreak, a medium-small blue-grey butterfly with an orange spot. Like the Western Tiger Swallowtail, the Gray Hairstreak overwinters as a pupa, camouflaged and hidden in our yards. Both fly until September or October, so we may yet see them this fall.
Resources: James and Nunnallee, Life Histories of Cascadia Butterflies; Pyle and LaBar, Butterflies of the Pacific Northwest.
Beaumont-Wilshire resident Gin McCollum has a food-thicket she is shifting to produce food not only for a human but also for native birds and butterflies. She finds mathematical structure in neural systems, and she writes.