Iowa's butterflies:
color and conservation

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By Dennis Schlicht

Note: This article contained many photos taken by Jim Messina, with accompanying captions that contain more information about Iowa's butterflies. If you'd like a free copy of this magazine issue, contact Diane Graves. If you'd like to receive this and future issues of INHF's magazine, consider INHF membership.

The butterfly you saw last summer has a more complicated relationship to its world than you might suspect. Not only is its life cycle completely unlike our own, but it relates to its environment in four completely different aspects (stages). Like so many other native species, Iowa's butterflies often have very specific habitat needs. Their presence or absence provides evidence about a site's quality and management history.

Iowa Butterflies
Iowa has about 122 species of butterflies, including breeding immigrants (who fly in from the south for warm months but cannot survive our winters), over-wintering residents and about 22 species of strays.

Iowa's richest butterfly areas are in the outside row of counties framing the state. The Loess Hills' unique prairie and savanna habitats support many butterfly species not found elsewhere in Iowa. North-central Iowa harbors a group of butterflies whose larvae use wetland plants for food. The rugged areas of northeast Iowa have diverse forest and hill prairie butterflies, while the Mississippi valley is a corridor for forest and wetland species. Far southeastern and southwestern counties host some species more typical of southern states.

Habitat needs
We can classify butterflies as generalists or specialists. Generalists-such as the Red Admiral, Painted Lady and the Black Swallowtail-are found throughout the state in many different habitats.

Specialists require a particular habitat or even a specific part of a habitat. The super-specialists or "obligate butterflies" require an even more specific relationship within a habitat. For example, if Olive Hairstreak eggs don't hatch on a red cedar tree, the caterpillars die. Other species are obligate to a specific soil type or animal. Once obligates are lost from an isolated habitat, they cannot re-colonize.

Prairie specialists in Iowa include the Regal Fritillary, Byssus Skipper, Melissa Blue and Prairie Ringlet. Woodland species include the Sleepy Duskywing, Hackberry Butterfly, Mourning Cloak and Comma. Wetland species include the Baltimore Checkerspot, Smokey Eyed Brown, Purplish Copper and Black Dash Skipper. Savanna species might include the Striped Hairstreak, Banded Hairstreak, Juvenal's Duskywing and Great Spangled Fritillary.

Butterflies at risk
Of the 100 or so breeding species in Iowa, nearly half have been reported from no more than a dozen places in the past few decades-and some from only a few places in the state. Prairie species, which account for about half (41) of our residents, are in the direst state. Two species have apparently been lost and a dozen others are very rare in Iowa. Butterflies are found less and less in agricultural areas because of the losses of woodlots, hay fields and permanent pastures. Without butterfly interactions, some plants and the animals they support are at risk.

Butterfly conservation is an issue not only in Iowa but worldwide. Habitat preservation is, of course, the first step. Meanwhile, habitat management-including prescribed prairie burns-must be done carefully or the "patient" may not survive the treatment.

Though we rarely see butterflies during Iowa's cold winters, they're out there-over-wintering in various life stages-awaiting the proper time and habitat to color our world.

Dennis Schlicht is a butterfly researcher, wood sculptor and Advanced Placement Biology teacher at Cedar Rapids, Washington High School. He's determined butterfly counts and diversity as part of several habitat assessment studies. Dennis and his wife Linda live in Center Point. Jim Messina, owner of Prairie Wings Media Productions in Cedar Rapids, is a photojournalist and TV producer who has been taking photos of Iowa's natural features since 1980.

Learn more about Iowa's butterflies through these additional resources by Dennis Schlicht and Jim Messina.

Life stages of Iowa's butterflies
Web sites and books about butterflies
How to manage habitat for butterflies

For more information, e-mail Cathy Engstrom, Director of Communications, or call (515) 288-1846.