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------------AUGUST, 1999-------------

New Butterfly House

If you are traveling to south central Missouri, you may wish to stop by The Butterfly Place at Branson. Located next to the Welk Champagne Theater, it has 9,000 square feet under a glass roof. Up to 2,000 individuals from ~50 different species may be seen. Native species may be seen in addition to exotics. They are open daily from 10 to 5 from March 19 to October 31, and from 10 to 4 in November and December.

If you want to contact them:

(Thanks to Marcia Wilson for the notice on this.)

Butterfly Destination

Frank Gibbs went to Bone Creek Lake in eastern Kansas in late June and found abundant butterflies – both species and numbers. It is located near the Missouri border west of US 69 north of Pittsburgh. Frank didn’t say what all he saw, but that close to the Ozarks, it should have a significantly different species mix compared to south central Kansas.

Marion County field trip

What a day! 9 people made the trek up to McPherson County State Lake, Maxwell Wildlife Refuge and Marion Reservoir on Saturday June 26. We were rewarded with 18 species and numerous individuals of butterflies including Regal Fritillaries. Probably our most numerous species was the Question Mark. We saw dozens of them. The weather was warm but not too warm and the mosquitoes were basically absent (from where we were anyway!).

Our one setback was that the planned visit to the insect collection at Tabor College had to be called off because Dr. Wall was out combining his wheat. This has been a very difficult year for the wheat harvest because of all the rain, so we could sympathize, although we were disappointed!

We did not know what to expect at the Willow Walk trail at Marion Lake. It turned out to a poor choice. The trail follows the margin of the lake in a wooded setting and then goes through an old farm field with little plant diversity, hence few butterflies. Next time, we’ll just spend the whole day at McPherson/Maxwell.

Monarch News

WE HAVE RECOVERIES!!!

The 1998 season summary for Monarch Watch shows that 3 of those Monarchs we tagged last September were found in March in the El Rosario reserve. In addition, a Monarch that Karla Jahn tagged in 1996 was found this spring! The circumstances surrounding the latter recovery are unknown. Was the tag laying on the ground and escaped notice until now? Did one of the rodent predators have it stashed away in some hollow log? What a mystery!

430 tags were recovered this season from Mexico, which dwarfs previous recoveries. Why so many this year? 50 pesos per tag paid by Monarch Watch, that’s why! This seemingly minor economic incentive brought in a bumper crop of data. Dr. Taylor is ecstatic because this will allow actual statistical analysis of the questions they have been trying to answer for so long.

4th of July Count

Clint Biggs, Karla Jahn, Sheryl Van Doren and your humble editor ventured forth on Saturday June 10 to see what was flying at Pawnee Prairie Park that day. Walking in the park was complicated by recent rains, which made it impossible to cross over to the east side of the creek on our return loop as we had done in the past.

We came up with 19 species and 157 individuals, which is fewer species but larger numbers than in previous years.

Here is our species list:

1 Black Swallowtail

2 Eastern Tiger Swallowtail

10 Clouded Sulphur

7 Orange Sulphur

1 Little Yellow

3 Dainty Sulphur

21 Eastern Tailed-Blue

1 Spring Azure

5 Pearl Crescent

4 Question Mark

3 Red Admiral

6 Common Buckeye

4 Hackberry Emperor

59 Common Wood Nymph

5 Monarch

1 Silver-spotted Skipper

1 Wild Indigo Duskywing

14 Common Checkered-Skipper

9      Sachem

Review: Butterfly CD-ROM

I recently broke down and bought the CD-ROM version of James Scott’s monumental "The Butterflies of North America". I first learned about it some time ago, but I already had the book and thought, "Why buy a digital version of the same thing?" Without actually being able to see it, I had no idea what its virtues or faults might be. As time went by I forgot about it until I recently visited the Iowa State entomology site on the Internet to see what was new for digital insect media. (That’s a dynamite resource, by the way. John VanDyk has done a great job. Check it out at: http://www.ent.iastate.edu/List/)

I saw the link for the product and followed it to the manufacturer. Previously I had never seen any specs on the disc, but now I could see that, in addition to the complete contents of the original book, it had 24 video clips as well as other new still images, full text search capability and background music even! An online order form made it easy to flex my credit card muscle, and I had it in my hands in 3 days.

So what do we have here? It’s not just one scanned page after another, but rather a completely cross-referenced and very mouse-able digital book. Hotlinks in any screen allow you to go where you need to very easily and this is the CD’s main virtue.

After a quick and easy installation, you open a main screen divided into sections on:

These correspond to the book divisions (with the exception of the Video Section of course). Tool buttons at the top allow you to create bookmarks and add notes, search for any word in the entire work and jump to that page, jump to any of the screens you have previously visited, and copy or print what you are looking at. A comprehensive help menu is also included.

The video section was kind of disappointing. There are some interesting behaviors documented in some of the videos, and there are some excellent photos of (gasp!) moths in this section also. But what value is there in seeing a bunch of caterpillars just sitting there in a clump? Or a butterfly basking?

This CD-ROM is not a hybrid, so Mac users are out of luck. But any PC-totin’ butterflyer will find this a valuable resource to own. The cost is $49.95 + S & H. To find out more or order your own copy, contact:

Hopkins Technology
421 Hazel Lane
Hopkins, MN 55343-7116
(612) 931-9376

web site: http://www.hoptechno.com/buttrfly.htm

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