Butterflies of the Bay Area and (Slightly) Beyond: An Illustrated Guide

INTRODUCTION

Twenty-five years ago I wrote in a journal:

Everything changed the other day. A doctor came back into the exam room and stared at me. “I have to do something that I’ve never had to do with a patient. Your test came back positive. You are HIV positive.”

I’m so codependent I immediately started to comfort him for having had to deliver the news. Then, I drove to my parents’ home. To this day I cannot shake the look of terror in my mother’s eyes when I told her. “We’ll get through this, Liam,” she said.

I drove back to my apartment in Benicia, and I remember picking up the Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Butterflies by Robert Michael Pyle, perhaps as a way to handle this pyroclastic flow I was now traveling on. Why this life preserver? I can’t really explain why I picked it up—butterflies had come into my life as early as 1996 but nothing with any hyper focus. I think something about the guide’s order, the taxonomy, and their beauty somehow seemed . . . larger and more important than the horror movie I’d just been handed. I also wrote, “I’m not sure where all of this is going. As the virus progresses, I hope it . . . can’t get my spirit. I hope.”

It was just fate that I acquired the condition right when it was changing from a death sentence to a chronic illness. I am not starting my butterfly book with this story to garner your pity. Please do not feel sorry for me; I’m doing great since starting the cocktail of medication soon after the diagnosis. A friend of mine said at the time, “Liam, the disease is set up for the poor and the wealthy, and unless you are planning to win the lottery tomorrow, I’d advise you to go make yourself poor.” A great deal has changed in the management of HIV since he said that. It’s still a rather complicated bureaucracy to negotiate. I bring all of this up because what I am about to say next might be difficult to understand: the virus gave me butterflies. And I don’t regret a second of hosting it in my body.

I used to be a professional stage actor. I studied, garnered skills and entered the Actors’ Equity union as a twenty-two-year-old. My secret weapon: a double barrel shotgun singing voice. Auditions came by the hundreds, but I learned early that people want to work with confident people. I also had luck. Lots of luck and a career in repertory theater that really took off. I got a job on Broadway in Les Misérables eight days after landing on the island of Manhattan, a dream many actors never fulfill. I stayed with the show for three years. Something, however, was always missing—drive. Try living in New York City without drive. Not possible. By then theater was something I just did, with almost no fulfillment. Performing in beautiful, cavernous places to audiences packed to the rafters, then home alone on a bus.

And then a butterfly flew into the yard . . . 

I’d moved back to San Francisco and now was playing the role of Prior Walter in Angels in America at the American Conservatory Theater. Living off the Duboce Triangle section of the city, I was fortunate enough to have a beautiful backyard, and one day I noticed a butterfly wafting down among the flowers. I hurried down to the garden to watch it. While gorging itself on pink cosmos flowers, this large, lemon-yellow insect let me approach quite closely. I ran back upstairs and got some paper and started sketching, something I hadn’t done since my college days. I can only now look at that moment and see that my entire life changed thanks to a visit from one Western Tiger Swallowtail (Papilio rutulus). I went down a rabbit hole that day in the yard, and I think I’m still down there. I joined The Lepidopterists’ Society soon thereafter. (Lepidopterist is a fancy word that means “scaled wings” in Latin and once you get the pronunciation down—Lep-pi-DOPT-er-rist—you’ll soon be impressing all your friends.) I started keeping a graphic journal, painting the places where the butterflies and moths were, then inserting them in the painted scenes, sort of a field guide in reverse.

I heard retired Professor Jerry Powell, a titan in the moth world and the man this book is dedicated to, say once in a lecture: “Learn where you live,” and I thought at the time, God, San Francisco, what a crap hole for butterflies. Interestingly enough, no one had inventoried the city’s species in decades, so, having quit the acting business, I decided to do that.

While combing the city, I started to consider an idea for something that we just might do to help a small green butterfly still hanging on in the Upper Sunset. I had absolutely no background in conservation, but it soon became a river I found myself a guide on, becoming the go-to person for all things butterflies in the city of San Francisco. One trains as an actor to have a dispassionate objectivity in observing and re-creating human behavior. It was an easy enough shift to apply that to the insect world. Not only do I find butterflies enthralling (who doesn’t, right? Except perhaps those few who suffer from lepidopterophobia, the fear of butterflies and moths), but I’m equally interested in our relationship to these creatures as well.

In this book I’m aiming for something a little different from the classic field guide. Here is a book that celebrates realistic paintings, pithy anecdotes, conservation, and the downright joy these bugs have given me. Give all of us. A book for the dead of winter that gives you the ability to dream up spring adventures where you might see some of the more obscure butterflies. But you can also stay home with this book, no matter the weather. If you see a butterfly in your yard or out your window, you’ll probably find it here.

Born in Redwood City, I grew up in one of the first tract developments in south San Jose called Almaden, in the Santa Clara Valley. It was nothing but plum orchards in any direction you looked back then. When not riding our bikes or building forts my brothers and I were exploring Ross Creek, a tributary of the Guadalupe River. I remember how cool the water of Ross Creek felt on my bare feet, turning my toes instantly pink. The creek ran with clear water and was full of frogs and tadpoles for kids to catch.

Since I moved back to the Bay Area as an adult, I’ve spent more than 30 years living in San Francisco, and the city has been a strategic center to radiate out from as I’ve explored our great variety of ecosystems, and the butterflies that live in each. We have oak woodland, riparian, even xeric communities represented in the Bay Area. Heck, I’m even going to get you excited about what you can find in vacant lots here. To the core counties of the Bay Area, I’ve added three more: Mendocino, shrouded in fog and home to some of our more obscure skippers; San Benito, long dismissed as not having any major natural interest (hello, the Pinnacles?); and Monterey with its tough to reach butterfly jewels. I want you all to get to all of these places and hopefully see the butterflies I’ve seen.

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It’s hard to discuss butterflies with other humans sometimes, people who don’t want to go any deeper than a Hallmark card. Butterflies are so weighed down in myth and misinformation that I’m somewhat stunned they can fly at all. In these pages I crowbar back a lot of emotion we’ve projected onto them and show them from new angles. I like the metaphor that I’ll be restoring these frescoes, painting them as true as I can possibly get. We have a great deal of buildup to strip away. Butterflies have been symbols for so long, but they are in truth living, wild, opportunistic insects, not pretty objects, nor as Jeffrey Glassberg, President of the North American Butterfly Association, puts it, “party favors for the human circus” (Glassberg.1999.1).

Now for the hypocritical part. I LOVE the beauty of them too. Hopefully you’ll come to appreciate the actual way they look and not some fantastical representations our society is saturated with. Though I’m not so hard-hearted to pull a crayon out of a child’s hand, I believe the realism I’m going for here makes objectifying them more difficult in the long run. By the time this book is published, I will have traversed every intimate dot, stripe, and false eye on over 130 species. Some may be wondering, Why painting, since photography has come so far?

The basic answer is that I am a romantic. I want to pay homage to all the great butterfly illustrators of the past: W. H. Howe, W. J. Holland, Titian Peale, and even John James Audubon (who painted them in reverse on glass plates—no small feat). I wanted to travel down every scale on every wing they traveled like a slow, aerial drone feasting on color and form, to bring forward some of the more subtle prejudices. For instance, why is the female of the species relegated in these kinds of books to being below and to the right in a smaller picture than the male? The female butterfly has her day in my book.

A painting will never obtain perfection but it’s important to set a high bar if your desire is to help people. Peter Brastow, founder of Nature in the City in San Francisco said, “Learning the name of the thing in front of you is the first moment in conservation” (Brastow.2007.per comm). I took my obligations to the reader seriously, and as they say, the portrait of an artist is revealed in their mistakes anyway.

The number one thing folks with HIV are supposed to stay away from is stress. It eats the immune systems T cells (the good guys) like Ms. Pac-Man eats those dots. So, what could be less stressful, I ask you, then a single human being watching a butterfly? The pause, the gaze, the concentration, the delight. How ironic is all of that?

The virus has connected me to nature in a profound and surreal way. I house a deadly, parasitic-like thing within me just as most butterfly caterpillars do. (Butterflies co-evolved with parasitic wasps and flies. That’s not a bad thing, folks. It just is.) The difference is that infected butterflies don’t make it to the flying, pretty phase we all love, and I got a bonus twenty-five years. I’m thinking now of all the people that didn’t make it, people I shared dressing rooms with, who just missed the lifesaving cocktail, and them being robbed of their new chapters. I have a lot of survivor’s remorse about that. Why me? Can you imagine all the butterflies they would have seen?

The world of butterflies was handed to me by the fate of the disease. What a blessing. What a gift. The virus has been a good tenant through the years—asymptomatic, low key, responds to a regime. Pays its rent on time. No drama.

And no, I don’t think it’s touched my spirit.