By SHAWNDRA MILLER, communications director, Central Indiana Land Trust
The wingbeats of a small brown butterfly have long reverberated through Indiana’s conservation community. A full 10 years before anyone even dreamed of the Central Indiana Land Trust Inc., the organization’s forerunners found one of the world’s rarest butterflies in Northern Indiana.
It’s a story that ended up being included in Butterflies of Indiana, Ernest Shull’s authoritative 1987 guidebook. It also demonstrates how today’s conservation work builds on ecologists’ decades-long research into Indiana’s most precious natural areas.
Land Trust member Lee Casebere, then assistant director of the Indiana Department of Natural Resource’s Division of Nature Preserves, recalls the moment. He and Jim Aldrich were doing natural inventory work in a “boggy/fenny site,” a “fen” being a low-lying wetland. Jim was an ecologist with the DNR’s Indiana Natural Heritage Program at the time.
It was a humid summer day, and their task was to document rare plants. Focused as he was on the unique plant community, Lee took notice when a little brown butterfly flitted by at about knee level.
“I wonder if that’s a Mitchell’s satyr?” he mused aloud.
Jim asked, “What’s a Mitchell’s satyr?”
“To which I proceeded to tell him that it was a rare butterfly not known in very many places, anywhere in the country,” Lee recounts. He told Jim that an Ohio farmer named Homer Price had found them at that very site in the 1950s.
Lee remembers, “That’s all it took for Jim to go chasing after the butterfly to try and catch it! Without a butterfly net!” Since the men were there to inventory plants, they didn’t have insect-collecting materials with them.
But Jim managed to catch the butterfly. Back in Indianapolis, the duo concluded the butterfly had to be a Neonympha mitchellii, an ID later confirmed by lepidoptera authority Ernest Shull. When his book came out, Shull included a line about Lee giving him a mitchellii that had been collected on July 11, 1980. He also documented Homer Price’s specimens found in 1956 in the same bog.
A few years later Ellen Jacquart, one of Land Trust’s founders, would be with Jim when the butterfly emerged at another Northern Indiana fen. Ellen interned for the Division of Nature Preserves from November 1986 to July 1987. Late in her time there, Jim invited her to accompany him to a LaPorte County wetland for inventory work.
“When we got there,” Ellen recalls, “we put on muck boots, Jim got out his metal clipboard to take notes, and we started heading across a wetland that had lots and lots of tussock sedge. We were hopping across the wetland from one tussock to another.”
Following Jim through the fen, Ellen’s chief focus was keeping water from overtopping her boots. But as it happened, a small brownish butterfly – for whom tussock sedge is a key host plant – was flying that very day.
“After about a half hour,” she remembers, “Jim yelled, ‘Oh!’ and lunged for the ground in one smooth movement.” The butterfly he caught that day would also be confirmed as a Mitchell’s satyr.
Ellen went on to lead the group that started Land Trust in 1990. Now the vice chair of its board of directors, she is helping guide efforts to save more land around the original northern Indiana site. Lee’s input has been crucial as well.
It is work made all the more urgent by the fact that there is no longer a fen where the second satyr was found. According to Lee, invasive plants overran the privately held LaPorte County property, and eventually the plant community shifted away from conservative fen species to those common to drier habitats.
For land that had likely been a wetland for millennia – possibly hosting the Mitchell’s satyr for the entire time – it was a radical change. One that spelled the end of the fine-leaved sedges that are the main food source for Mitchell’s satyr caterpillars.
Habitats can degrade beyond recognition. That is always a possibility. But the multi-generational project of protecting a key wetland complex continues. The land trust is buffering and expanding the protected area, with a goal of nurturing the “boggy/fenny site” back to what it would have looked like in 1980 (and earlier). Because of this effort, this dwindling species may yet take wing in Indiana.
Note: Best practices around lepidoptera identification have evolved in the years since those 1980s sightings. Instead of collecting specimens, visual identification in the field is increasingly the norm. The land trust team uses “satyr sticks” to lightly brush the vegetation and stir insects into flight. No specimens are captured. Instead, identification is based on a combination of physical characteristics, like color pattern and size, coupled with flight behavior.
Headquartered in the Old Northside, the Central Indiana Land Trust partners with conservation organizations statewide to preserve the best of Indiana’s natural areas, protecting plants and animals, so Hoosiers can experience the wonder of the state’s natural heritage. Find hiking destinations at conservingindiana.org.
