For the last few weeks, beauty has been quietly flowing through
the air above Central California. The painted lady butterfly
migration is underway. I have been watching them stream past from
south to north, watching them feed on the plum tree blossoms
outside my kitchen window, and watching the little girls next door
pause in their jump-rope games to gaze, entranced, at the orange
and black parade above their heads.
For the last few weeks, beauty has been quietly flowing through the air above Central California. The painted lady butterfly migration is underway. I have been watching them stream past from south to north, watching them feed on the plum tree blossoms outside my kitchen window, and watching the little girls next door pause in their jump-rope games to gaze, entranced, at the orange and black parade above their heads.
Some of my friends have assumed that the butterflies are monarchs, but the 11-year-olds who were in my fourth grade biology class two years ago know better. We raised painted ladies, more formally known as Vanessa cardui, that year. We bought the larva (caterpillars) from Carolina Biological Supply, fed them the disgusting tan goop that came with them, with occasional treats of unsprayed malva, gave them twigs to hang from when they turned into pupae (chrysalises), and freed them when they emerged to pump up their wings as butterflies.
That is, most of us freed them. Little Megan, youngest and shortest member of the class, enjoyed her butterfly experience so much that she kept her painted ladies, feeding them fruit slices and sugar water, giving them malva plants to lay their eggs on, and eventually raising three generations of Vanessa cardui.
Of course, one need not raise three generations of butterflies to tell a painted lady from a monarch. It is true that both are orange and black, but the flight pattern is entirely different. The monarch flies beautifully, effortlessly; it floats like a butterfly. Painted ladies flutter erratically, spasmodically. They make flying look like hard work.
Even though I had raised painted ladies from centimeter-long caterpillars to full-fledged butterflies, I was stymied by a question from my co-worker Michelle. “Where are they migrating from and to?” she asked.
I went online to find out. UC Davis and UC Irvine both had articles on the topic dating from the last major migration in 2005. Painted ladies winter in the desert on the California-Mexico border. In a normal rainfall year, most of the caterpillars die for want of food.
But when rainfall is exceptionally abundant, more caterpillars survive to adulthood, and migrate in noticeable numbers north through the Central Valley and into the foothills. The butterflies start with a large supply of yellow fat, and can fly for up to three days before it is depleted, at which point they stop to lay eggs on malva, fiddleneck and thistles.
“The fat is what makes the yellow splotch on your wind shield when you hit one,” according to Arthur Shapiro, biology professor at UC Davis.
If one has any weeds at all in the backyard, malva (also called mallow or cheeseweed) is one of them. It is the weed with round leaves and the long taproot that is so easy to pull out of the ground. Right now, if one examines the underside of the leaves, chances are one will find the orange eggs of the painted lady.
Of course, the inference that we must have had an unusually good rain year in the desert was enough to make me wonder how we are doing with rainfall and reservoirs locally. I visited the Santa Clara Valley Water District Rainfall and Reservoir report site, and was thrilled to see that our local reporting site at Coyote Reservoir says we have had 13.31 inches of rainfall, which is 95 percent of the seasonal average to date.
Uvas Reservoir is at 80 percent of capacity, up from 17 percent a month ago, which is more than usually full for this time of year. The total amount of water in all ten reservoirs is at 102 percent of average for this time of year.
Our reservoirs are not full yet. More rain would be great, though it does not seem too likely. But how the water district or the city can possibly be thinking of mandatory water rationing this year just boggles my mind.
People can and will work together cheerfully and resourcefully in an emergency. People are not stupid. People do not like being told that we are in a drought when we are at 95 percent of normal. Save the rationing for a real drought.
