THEY’RE COMING!!!

It’s barely spring, officially – way too early to be thinking about butterflies, right? Nope.��The first butterflies of the year have already been reported on the Wisconsin Butterflies website () (which also serves your Tiger beetle and Robber fly needs).��

Our first butterflies are usually the anglewings (commas and Question Marks Anglewings (Family Nymphalidae) – Field Station) and the Mourning Cloaks Mourning Cloak Revisited – Field Station.��Why? Because they go through the winter as adults, tucked up into a sheltered spot (called a hibernaculum).��These are the species that are seen by people tapping maple trees in the Sugarbush during the warm days of late winter.��When the cold returns – and it always does, except in the bizarre spring of 2012 – they seek shelter again.��They are able to be abroad in early spring, before the wildflowers bloom, because they feed on sap from sap drips, juice from rotting fruits, and minerals from animal droppings.

The other early butterflies are species that overwintered as a chrysalis and emerged in spring – Cabbage Butterflies Cabbage Whites and Sulphurs Redux – Field Station and a couple of “blue” butterflies, the Eastern Tailed-Blue and the “Spring” Spring Azure Small Blue Butterflies – Field Station.��In very warm years, early individuals of these species have been recorded in late March.��Our first Monarch sightings usually come in May.

Back to the Monarchs. A year ago, winter censuses of the eastern and western populations, Monarch Butterfly showed that numbers were down The Monarch Butterfly Problem – Field Station. This year’s census found eastern Monarchs occupying 64% more territory in Mexico’s oyamel fir forests than last year.��Not a home run, but reason for optimism .

Monarchs are on the way! Check the Journey North interactive map – .��For more information, see .��

Mike Reese has built a wonderful community of butterfly-lovers who make reports to the Wisconsin Butterflies website; and while it is more anonymous, the Wisconsin Odonata Survey website () contains a treasure trove of information.��Where do all those reports come from? Us – they are two examples of Citizen/Community Science projects here in Wisconsin! Register with the site, keep track of the butterflies and/or dragonflies/damselflies you see on your walks or in your back yard (you need to take a nose count of the butterflies but not of the dragonflies), and then log on to record what you’ve seen.�� Both sites accept pictures.  

The Journey North organization offers another Community Science project called the monarch larva monitoring project .

Go outside – look for butterflies!

The BugLady

The post Monarch Butterflies – Spring, 2026 appeared first on Field Station.

This is a Good-News-Bad News-Stay-Tuned kind of story. 

But first, a little background.��Besides being large and lovely, Monarch butterflies, of course, catch our fancy because of the death-defying migrations they undertake twice a year.��Migrations – fueled by flowers – that carry some of them 3,000 miles from Canada into central Mexico.��

Monarchs have a wide geographical range today, but only part of it is historic. They’ve been introduced or have found their way to and established populations in Hawaii (there’s a white subspecies in Oahu), some Caribbean Islands, Australia, New Zealand, and more, and they are accidental migrants to other spots on the globe. 

Most of the North American Monarch population is divided between the Western Monarchs that occupy the Pacific Coast west of the Rockies and overwinter in the southern half of California, and the Eastern Monarchs that range from the Rockies to the Atlantic Coast and overwinter in the oyamel fir forests in a mountainous area west of Mexico City. There are also pockets of Monarchs that are permanent residents in Arizona, around the Gulf Coast through Florida, and along the Eastern Seaboard as far north as Virginia.

FIRST, THE GOOD(-ISH) NEWS.  Every winter the population of Eastern Monarchs that overwinters in the Mariposa Monarca Biosphere Reserve is censused by counting how many acres/hectares of the Reserve that they occupy (one hectare equals a little less than 2.5 acres or about two football fields). The 2024 survey found Monarchs on only 2.22 acres, one of the lowest densities since the count began in 1993, but in-2025, 4.42 acres were occupied. Good news but not great news – the population is still very low, and some researchers say that in order to be sustainable, the population should cover about 15 acres. 

Better weather, less drought, and better protections for the fir forests against illegal logging are credited with the increase (although, according to the Center for Biological Diversity, an ongoing threat to the forests is cutting trees in order to grow avocados for American tables).

Will this year’s boost become a trend? Monarch numbers tend to see-saw. On the negative side, a warming climate is rendering the mountainous Reserve less habitable for the firs and is making larger swatches of the South too warm for Monarch reproduction.  And then there are the pesticides that affect both the plants and the insects themselves. On the positive side, citizens along the butterflies’ path are getting the message about planting the milkweed needed by Monarch caterpillars and a variety of nectar plants for the adults. For more background on Monarch populations, see here.

THEN THE BAD NEWS. Western Monarchs, historically numbered in the millions and whose numbers had exceeded 200,000 in recent counts, suffered a major crash this year, with the 2024-2025 survey finding just over 9,000 butterflies. The “break-even” number for survival of the Western Monarch may be as high as 30,000, and some scientists put them at a 99% probability of being extinct by 2080.

A recent study shows a 22% decline in butterfly numbers across multiple species over the past twenty years.

AND THE STAY-TUNED NEWS. A few years ago, there was some momentum to list Monarchs as Threatened under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). An “Endangered” designation means that a species is in danger of going extinct over all or part of its range, and a “Threatened” species is one that is likely to become Endangered within the foreseeable future over all or a significant portion of its range. For that story, see here.

For various reasons, among them the fact that Monarch numbers can vary dramatically from year to year, the decision was kicked down the road. Then, in 2024, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) again proposed listing the Monarch. The deadline for public comment, initially set to expire in March, was extended until May 19, with a possible decision to be announced by the end of 2025. If accepted, the Monarch would be the “most common” Threatened species ever listed, which causes some observers to say that it’s still too early to bring them under the ESA umbrella.   

Monarchs are already listed as Endangered in Canada and are recognized as a Species of Special Protection in Mexico.

Listing a Threatened or Endangered Species has far-reaching ripples, both monetary and regulatory (land use restrictions, for example), and requires a Solomon-like crafting of the law. Any species added to the list must have a budget and a realistic game plan for recovery – one that, in the case of the Monarch, would attempt to turn back the clock on decades of habitat loss and degradation, pesticide use, and the effects of climate change. Changing weather patterns have exposed spring migrants to stormy weather, and warmer falls have caused many Monarchs to linger in the north.  

Ideally, people should embrace the conservation goals of a recovery plan voluntarily, and any plan should allow for the continuation of state and local efforts by individuals, agencies, and organizations. Too rigorous, and people will resent it and it will become a political hot-potato; not rigorous enough and the plan will fail the species.  In the case of the Monarch, both the butterfly and its remarkable migration are in peril. 

Fun Fact about Monarchs: they were the first butterfly species to have its genome sequenced.

Another Fun Fact about Monarchs:  the name “Monarch” is thought to be a reference to 17^th century British King William III, also called the Prince of Orange (the British royalty/peerage also figured into the naming of the Baltimore Oriole and the Baltimore Checkerspot butterfly after Lord Baltimore, whose servants sported orange and black livery). 

Yet Another Fun Fact about Monarchs: according to Wikipedia, they’re the state insect of Alabama, Idaho, Illinois, Minnesota, Texas, Vermont, and West Virginia, and there were unsuccessful attempts in 1989 and 1991 to name them the National Insect of the United States.  

Final Fun Fact about Monarchs: THEY’RE COMING! .

The BugLady

The post Monarch Butterfly Status Update appeared first on Field Station.

Howdy, BugFans,

The BugLady sat on the hawk tower today, watching the start of the fall migration. She was surrounded by the start of the dragonfly migration – there was a big emergence of the migratory population of Common Green Darners yesterday, and both darners and Black Saddlebags were drifting south along the lakeshore. It doesn’t get any better than this.

A friend of the BugLady’s found one of these spiffy moths recently and wanted information about it. Here’s a rerun from 10 years ago.

Lichen moths have it all!! Toxins, aposematism, attitude, thoracic tympana and ultrasonic emanations, sensory setae, fecal flicking, mimicry, and even cannibalism! What an insect!!

Taxonomic Lumpers and Splitters have been working on the moths again. Lichen moths (Hypoprepia sp) are in the Tiger moth family Arctiidae – or in the family Erebidae – depending on whose book you read. Apparently, a bunch of moths in the Owlet moth family plus all of the members of the tussock moth and tiger moth families, plus a bunch of small families have been assigned to the family Erebidae, but Moth People are not 100% onboard with that yet, so stay tuned. And, according to Wagner in Caterpillars of Eastern North America, “Adults of eastern Hypoprepia vary considerably in different parts of the Southeast, so much so that some lepidopterists feel additional species will eventually be recognized.”

Lichen moth eat lichens and blue-green algae that they find growing on tree trunks. As BugFans will recall from high school biology, lichens are a plant partnership – two plants growing symbiotically as one. Structure, roots, and water are provided by a fungus “body,” and photosynthesis is carried out by algae that live within the fungus (or, as we Naturalists say – too often – “a lichen is a fungus and an alga that have taken a likin’ to each other.”). Along with lichens, caterpillars have been reported to eat their smaller brethren and even LM pupae.

Toxins from their veggies may make LM caterpillars poisonous to predators. The hairy caterpillars don’t come in startling warning (aposematic) colors (they look a bit like gypsy moth ), but the bright colors of the adults probably signal a non-tasty morsel within.

Like the caterpillars of the Silver-spotted skipper butterfly (of previous BOTW fame), caterpillars in the genus Hypoprepia are able to fire their frass (bug poop) up to 30 body lengths away from themselves. It’s called “fecal flicking.” Why do it? Some parasitic and predatory wasps track down potential prey by the scent of its frass, so the LM distances itself from its by-products. Anal combs trap frass that’s coming down the pipeline and hold it until the “blood pressure” at the caterpillar’s tip becomes too great and the frass rifles out (the BugLady couldn’t make this up).

LMs have some interesting sensory abilities, both as caterpillars and as adults. Like typical adult tiger moths, LMs have “ears” located on their thorax. They also make a variety of ultrasonic noises with organs on their thorax – this is an insect that can hear bats coming and, confident in its toxicity, sass them back, warning them against feeding on unwholesome LMs. They also “vocalize” during courtship, and females have a pair of glands on the top of their thorax that crank out pheromones – chemical “scents” that lure males to them. According to Sogaard, in Moths of the North Woods, caterpillars in the family are “typically densely hairy. Some (perhaps all) caterpillars are sensitive to low-frequency sound through setae” (hairs).

LMs overwinter as caterpillars, and adult LMs in this neck of the woods probably do not eat, though their tropical brethren do.

The BugLady has been going happily bug-eyed trying to decide whether these are

SCARLET/SCARLET-WINGED LICHEN MOTHS or PAINTED LICHEN MOTHS or both (she suspects both). are supposed to be very red and to have a yellowish cast, but she’s seen official pictures of each that stray into the other’s tint. One reference suggests that SLMs have red heads and PLMs have yellow/gray heads (or maybe not). At any rate, their lifestyles, ranges, and habitats (woodlands, east of the Rockies) are very similar, and these are two of only four species in the genus in North America. Right now.

It has been suggested that adult PAINTED LICHEN MOTHS (Hypoprepia fucosa) mimic lightning beetles, which have toxic blood.

SCARLET LICHEN MOTHS (Hypoprepia miniata) are partial to lichens that grow on the trunks of red pine, and therefore gravitate to more coniferous woodlands (though they will nosh on lichens elsewhere if red pines aren’t available). Miniata comes from the Latin word miniatus, which references lead-based vermillion or red paint.

Oh – and they have beauty!

The BugLady

The post Lichen Moths appeared first on Field Station.

Summer has reached its half-way point, and the BugLady has been recording the changing of the guard. The adult lives of most insects are brief – four to six weeks for many, and considerably less for some. Bluet damselflies are fading, but meadowhawk dragonflies are taking the stage. Little Wood Satyr butterflies are hard to find, but Common wood nymphs now flit through the fields. You get the picture. Here are some bugs that the BugLady found in the first half of summer.

ARROW CLUBTAIL: In early July, the BugLady came across this just-emerged dragonfly sitting on a stalk in the Milwaukee River. She photographed it for half an hour as it lengthened and strengthened and spread its wings and grew its abdomen. She guarded it from marauding geese and grackles. And she watched as it took its maiden voyage, eight feet straight up and true – into the beak of a swooping Cedar Waxwing. She may have used a few bad words.

JAPANESE BEETLE: Precarious as this bundle of beetles looked, it kept its shape as it fell off and into the grasses. In order to jump-start her love life, a female Japanese beetle may use “come hither” pheromones, but this aggregation of beetles was probably initiated (inadvertently) by the plant itself. Research suggests that a female Japanese beetle chewed on a leaf, and the leaf gave off signature chemicals (OK – feeding-induced plant volatiles), and that instead of repelling the beetles, the scent attracted more beetles, both male and female, to feed. And, since all those guys and gals are in the same neighborhood…

MAYFLY MOLT: BugFan Freda sent this amazing “What-is-it?” picture recently, taken from a canoe on the Milwaukee river. Mayflies (called “lake flies” regionally) emerge from their watery cradles by the googol. Their lives are brief, averaging only three days (not coincidentally, the name of the mayfly order is Ephemeroptera).

Mayflies are the only insects that shed their skins after they reach the winged adult stage (silverfish shed as adults, too, but they’re spindle-shaped and wingless). The crawls out onto a plant or rock and sheds its final skin (exuvia), emerging as a form called a subimago (or a “dun” if you’re a fly fisherman) that is cloudy-winged, dull in color, weak-flying, and not ready to reproduce. The sub-imago rests (often overnight) and then sheds again, this time into a mature adult/imago with shiny wings (a “spinner” to fishermen). Here’s a . No – scientists do not know how this pre-adult stage benefits the mayflies – lots of insect groups apparently has a subimago stage in ancient times, and most have dropped it from their repertory.

Freda’s picture shows the exuviae of lots of sub-imagoes – it must have been an amazing sight to see! Scroll down this series of of that final shed.

DOGBANE LEAF BEETLE: Its fabulous, shimmering exterior is all done with mirrors (complex nanoarchitecture). Light is bent when it hits small, randomly-tilted plates that sit between the pigment layer and the top layer of the beetle’s cuticle, and the beetle’s color changes depending on the angle of the eye of the beholder. What good is that glow? Rather than being an aid in courtship or a warning of the beetle’s toxicity (and this particular beetle is, but not all iridescent insects are), this fiery iridescence actually camouflages it. To test the hypothesis, researchers disguised meal worms with beetle elytra (the hard outer wings) – some shiny and some not – and then hid them. Birds found and ate 85% of the “dull-winged meal worms,” but only 60% of the “iridescent meal worms,” and the scientists themselves found it difficult to locate the shiny ones.

STREAM BLUET AND MAYFLY: In order to make it to adulthood, a mayfly naiad must avoid being eaten by fish and a variety of insects during its aquatic stage, and by fish, birds, fishing spiders, frogs, and other predators as it completes both of its molts. When it takes to the air, more predators await. This mayfly became lunch for a Stream Bluet damselfly.

DOODLEBUG: The BugLady found this doodlebug on the dunes at Kohler-Andrae State Park in mid-July, plying its trade. She looked into lots of inverted, sandy cones before she found one that held prey – in this case, a small spider. The doodlebug will grow up to be an antlion . For an account of the life of a doodlebug, see this former post.

SAWFLY: Sawflies are not flies, but are primitive wasps with no stingers (as she did when she wrote her first episode about sawflies in 2009, the BugLady recommends reading the sawfly chapter in David W. Stokes’ excellent A Guide to Observing Insect Lives). Sawfly larvae look a lot like butterfly and moth caterpillars, but there’s a difference in the arrangement and types of legs. This beauty just might be the , whose pretty cute offspring, the BugLady is going to have to keep a cautious eye out for. “Sawfly” because the female uses a saw-like structure at the end of her abdomen to cut slots in vegetation to lay her eggs in.

BLACK SWALLOWTAIL CATERPILLAR: While the BugLady was photographing the sawfly, she noticed a prickly head among the Queen Anne’s lace florets, so she bent the stem sideways to see what it was. There was a cute little jumping spider under there, too, which she hoped did not have designs on the caterpillar. Black Swallowtails lay their eggs on plants in the carrot family, and most gardeners who plant dill are familiar with them (and, the BugLady hopes, are generous enough to share).

BLUE MUD DAUBERS: They are all over the Queen Anne’s lace these days. Adults cruise the flower tops, sipping nectar and looking for spiders to cache in the egg chambers of their offspring, who will grow up on protein but eschew it as adults. Sometimes the wasps pick spiders right off of their webs, and they especially like to collect (which are here in God’s Country but are rare). They grab spiders with their and paralyze them with a sting, but they don’t bite people, and you have to rough one up considerably before she’ll sting you.

EMERALD ASH BORER: The BugLady loves ash trees, but these days, the landscape is littered with their skeletons. The first Emerald ash borer was detected in Wisconsin in Ozaukee County during the summer of 2008, though the EABs had undoubtedly been around for a few years before that. The picture shows an ash that is fighting for its life, a battle that it will not win. The top of this ash is dead, because the EAB larvae’s tunnels (galleries) just below the bark interfere with the flow of nutrients between the crown of the tree and its roots. The stressed tree responds by growing a bunch of shoots (called epicormic sprouts) from dormant buds in the bark of the trunk. The leafy sprouts, which are below the EAB damage, will allow the tree to photosynthesize – for a while. Read about EABs in a previous BOTW. EABs are, undeniably, beautiful beetles: , , .

SIX-SPOTTED FISHING SPIDER: Moving from a “solid” water lily leaf to a liquid substrate is no trick at all for a Six-spotted Fishing spider (the six spots that give it its name are on its underside) – in fact, it has more moves on the water than it does on dry land. It can walk, run, sail, or skate over the surface film and can dive under it, too.

GIANT SWALLOWTAIL: If there’s anything more stunning than a couple of Giant Swallowtails dancing in the air over purple coneflowers, the BugLady doesn’t know what it is.

The BugLady

The post Mid-Summer Scenes appeared first on Field Station.

The BugLady found this velvety, deeply maroon caterpillar at the Land Trust’s CESA site on a fine June day. It’s the larva of a Straight-toothed sallow moth (���ܱ�����������������Գܱ���Գٲ�) (probably). (Full disclosure – the experts caution us that the only way to positively ID an Eupsilia caterpillar is by rearing it to an adult.)

Sallows are a group of Owlet moths (family Noctuidae) that are pretty hardy – depending on the latitude, moths may be active all winter, or overwintering adults may emerge from hibernation, fly around, and visit maple sugaring operations on balmy winter days when the temperature climbs above freezing (For a scenic side trip, see “ .”). One source reported seeing the moths searching for warmer shelters on sub-freezing nights, shelters they locate using their antennae.

������Caterpillars of Eastern North America, David Wagner notes that sallows readily come to sugar baits (Eupsilia species “gather by the hundreds at beer or sugar or other baits”). He recommends to us Holland’s description of baiting moths, and the BugLady is grateful to the . They just don’t write science like that anymore.

The Moth Book by W.J. Holland was published in 1904, and with 48 (XLVIII) plates crammed with images, it was for decades the moth Bible. (The down side was that moths are pictured like the pinned specimens that they are, with their wings spread, rather than perched naturally.) By 1926, it had joined five other books in a set called The Nature Library, and the set that the BugLady grew up with her nose in probably belonged to her Mom.

Kirk Mona, in his Twin Cities Naturalist blog found an alternate name for the Straight-toothed sallow – he says “The name the Satellite comes from the little spots that seem to orbit like satellites around the larger spot on the fore wings. What a cool name! It is much cooler than ‘ .”

Adults are variable in color, from to brown, to . They mate in late winter and early spring. . Adults nectar on early tree flowers like red maple.

are somewhat generalist feeders, found on the leaves of an assortment of shrubs and trees like box elder, oak, cherry and maple. Wagner says that younger larvae are “new-leaf specialists that fashion crude leaf shelters in young leaves,” and they may use the abandoned shelters made by other caterpillars. According to Owlet Caterpillars of Eastern North America, older caterpillars are found on the in leaf litter on the ground and may feed on low-growing plants or on plant material (like old flowers and catkins) that’s fallen off of trees.

On another front, Monarch butterflies are starting to reach our southern borders.�� Here’s info about the . And here’s an

Go outside – look for moths (and listen for owls, too)!

The BugLady

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