Researchers test key element of county's plan to protect Fender's blue

By BENNETT HALL

CORVALLIS Gazette-Times

WREN - The Fender's blue butterfly does a lot of living in a very short time.

It has to. In its adult form, the silver dollar-sized pollinator has only a week to 10 days to find a mate before it dies.

For Tyler Hicks, watching the endangered insects do their delicate dance of survival in the flower meadows of Benton County is a little bit like hanging out in a singles bar.

"The males are trying to find females and nectar resources - not much different from what we do," said Hicks, a graduate student from Washington State University-Vancouver participating in a study of the butterfly.

While the blue-winged males are chasing females, the brown-winged females are searching for places to lay their eggs. But not just any old bush will do - they're looking for Kincaid's lupine, a threatened flower whose leaves provide a crucial food source for Fender's blue larvae, which will eventually metamorphose into next year's butterflies and begin the process anew.

Hicks wants to know how far this year's butterflies will go to find the lupine.

"The main objective of my little study is to see how the females move across the landscape," he said. "We're really interested in female movement because they can move eggs around."

Maintaining the balance

The research is important for Benton County, which is drafting a habitat conservation plan for the federally protected Fender's blue. It also covers Kincaid's lupine and five other threatened species of prairie plants and animals once common in the Willamette Valley but now facing the possibility of extinction.

The plan sets up a system of "incidental take" permits that would allow the county, as well as individual landowners and developers, to destroy limited amounts of Fender's blue habitat in exchange for creating or enhancing more habitat nearby to ensure the butterfly's continued survival.

Without a permit, killing the butterfly or damaging its habitat would be a violation of the federal Endangered Species Act. Penalties range up to $50,000 in fines and a year in jail.

But the whole approach falls apart if butterflies from established populations are unable or unwilling to colonize new sites - or recolonize old ones after a disturbance.

A key element of the habitat conservation plan is the notion of setting up mitigation areas to replace butterfly habitat lost to construction, road maintenance or other forms of "incidental take." People and agencies granted permits to damage butterfly habitat would be required to plant Kincaid's lupine or nectar plants.

The county intends to purchase 50 to 60 acres of conservation easements in the so-called "blue zones," areas where Fender's blue populations are known to exist, and use them for mitigation banks as well as to protect established habitat.

The hope is that the butterflies will be able to move among established and new patches of habitat, maintaining a stronghold for local populations of the species while development is allowed to continue in the county.

3 Blue's journey

But will the butterflies be able to find the new homes humans have prepared for them? Even if it means having to cross natural barriers such as dense forest?

In an attempt to find out, Hicks spent several weeks this spring in a complex of butterfly meadows in the wooded hills near Wren, catching Fender's blues and carefully marking their wings with colored Sharpie pens. He marked 50 butterflies, 20 males and 30 females.

Then he prowled the meadows with a net, a notebook, a pair of binoculars and a GPS receiver. Every time he saw a marked butterfly, he recorded its position and what it was doing.

On May 16, he netted a copper-colored female and inked her wing with a blue numeral 3. On May 17, he caught her again in a different meadow, on the far side of a stand of fir trees. On the 18th, 3 Blue was back in the first meadow again.

It was the first documented case in Benton County of a Fender's blue moving through the woods from one habitat patch to another.

"She made it over there and she made it back," Hicks said. "And we observed her laying eggs, so we know one can do it."

By the time he wrapped up his work last month, Hicks had recorded four cases of female butterflies moving between habitat patches, including one that traveled more than a kilometer across woods and other impediments to lay her eggs.

Out of the woods

Hicks' professor, Cheryl Schultz, called those results very encouraging.

"Before this we were seeing them move into the woods," Schultz said last week. "The question we had … was: What do they do when they go into the woods?"

Schultz, who teaches conservation biology at Washington State University-Vancouver, has been studying the Fender's blue since 1993. Over the past two years, she and her students have documented more than 600 observations of butterfly movements near meadow margins.

The latest study, while small in scale, provides important "ground-truthing" for that work by documenting the butterflies' behavior after they disappear between the trees.

"The hope is that as you improve and recover and restore habitat that is close to other patches that the butterflies will find that habitat on their own," Schultz said. "We were reassured and excited to see that the butterflies were moving through the landscape as we expected them to."

Not only were the butterflies finding their way to new habitat patches, Schultz said, but they were taking care of business when they got there.

"It's critical that the butterflies are laying eggs."

The ultimate test

In the meantime, the Benton County Prairie Species Habitat Conservation Plan is making its way through the approval process.

A 90-day comment period on the draft plan ended in April. The revised version should be available for public review in August.

After another 30-day comment period, a final draft will be presented to the Benton County Board of Commissioners for approval before being forwarded to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, which has enforcement authority for the Endangered Species Act.

But even if the federal agency signs off on the plan, that doesn't necessarily mean the end of the mitigation debate. Ultimately, the county's strategy will have to prove itself on the ground - by keeping endangered butterfly numbers from dropping any further.

Only 3,000 to 7,000 Fender's blues are estimated to exist in their historic Willamette Valley range, and their native prairie habitat is badly fragmented.

Tom Kaye, the executive director of the Institute of Applied Ecology and one of the architects of the habitat conservation plan, points out that all mitigation actions are subject to monitoring, and that the federal government will be keeping a close eye on the results.

"If mitigation fails to compensate for those losses, additional losses may not be allowed by the Fish and Wildlife Service. The Fish and Wildlife Service could say, 'You don't have a permit anymore,'" Kaye said. "If it's not working, then additional take is not allowed."

Bennett Hall can be reached at 758-9529 or bennett.hall@lee.net.