A Tale of Two Seasons . . . AGAIN!!

If you look back through the website you will find that last October I wrote a post entitled “A Tale of Two Seasons”. It would seem that this year is deja vu all over again.

The first half of our 2025 season was awful for people, butterflies, and moths. The big culprit was rain, at least for the moths. Truth be told, prior to the beginning of August, it was nearly impossible to get a mothing session in because it rained so many evenings. As reminder, our equipment does not respond well to rain.

For butterflies, the first half of the year much more resembled one of our early seasons, 2017 perhaps, long before all of our habitat work started to show results. I would have to think the downfall for the butterflies was part drought of 2024 and rain forest of early 2025. We were sort of expecting a disappointing butterfly spring because of the drought of 2024.

Regarding people visiting Butterfly Ridge, as of the end of June, our visitation (and sales) were down by fifteen percent compared to the same time in 2024. I would assume that the rain had a lot to do with that, but I cannot say for sure.

But with the arrival of July, both the visitor and butterfly trends flipped on their heads. We had our second best July butterfly transect ever, along with our second best August transect, and our best September and October transects ever. We finished the year with our best butterfly year ever!

Our visitation went from a decline of 15% percent to an increase of 24% by the end of the season. Average daily visitation of 20 people in June was replaced with a daily average of 60 people in July and August. We finished the year with our best attendance and gift shop sales ever!

I think I can in part, explain the increase in butterflies. So much spring rain made for very lush plant growth which provided better than average flower nectar and host leaves. Explaining the dramatic increase in visitors? Your guess is as good as mine, although we suspect a very lovely write-up about us in Cooperative Living magazine by Jamie Rhein did play a role.

We had some really cool new sightings for the property, including Zebra Swallowtail and White-M Hairstreak. My dream moth, the Black Witch, made an appearance in early August along with a state listed moth species, and beauty in its own right, the Pink Streak Moth.

WHite M Hairstreak. Photo by Pike Fetgatter

We had another great crew of interns this year, as always, who did a lot of planting, trail maintenance, and creation of a new woodland opening. I am especially excited to see the results of their planting in the prairie next season.

Can you expect anything new for next year? Absolutely, and we’ve already gotten started with it. If you visited us later in the season you may remember a large grouping of Jerusalem Artichoke next to the walkway into the building. The tubers from that patch have been thinned out, with some being transplanted to the prairie and others being transplanted to the clearing near the treehouse.

Jerusalem Artichoke tubers.

We have also been debating adding an exhibit to our classroom space in the nature center. We are planning on doing that for next year, but not in the classroom. Instead, those exhibit panels will be incorporated into the walking tour of the trail. The exhibit will discuss the historical significance of the property and the region and greater details of the roles of butterflies and moths in the ecosystem. The exhibit will be titled “Respecting the Past, Protecting the future”, with the exhibit logo being created by one of our outstanding local artists, Jade Watkins. The cabin in the logo is based on the old cabin that used to inhabit our homestead loop a couple generations ago.

Speaking of artwork, we have asked Kevin Morgan, of Pawpaw Festival fame to create another t-shirt design for us. The new design will celebrate our Mothing Zone programs, and we are making sure it includes a Luna Moth!

Finally, I am not sure how many of you remember our conservation specialist Amanda Frazier from a few years back. We had created a special position for her because a) she was wonderful, and b) she would give us some stability with our staffing and conservation methods. We are strongly considering resurrecting that position to fill in 2026. It is seasonal, full-time, and permanent, which I know sounds confusing. Basically it would be 40 hours per week, April - October, with an automatic rehire for the next year. We would also like to encourage this person to do some off-site talks for us during the off-season. Have not decided upon pay, but probably in the neighborhood of $15/hour. However, the work we do (and the people that Mr. Chris and Mrs. Kris are!) is unique enough that we really feel a need to start the search with past interns, folks that know our routines and weirdities. Any past interns who may be reading this, if you think you might be interested, reach out please.

We will have some volunteer opportunities during the off-season to help with seed processing, and we very much want to expand our off-site talks this winter. If you can help with either, please let us know.