Earth Almanac: May/June 2009

Barflies

As the ascending sun greens the continent, many species of butterfly—especially blues, swallowtails, sulphurs, and skippers—congregate around wet soil, sometimes by the hundreds, in “drinking clubs.” As with humans, participants are mostly younger males, and they’re taking on some of the same nutrients—sodium and amino acids of the sort found in beer and booze, for instance. The difference is that male butterflies lose sodium and amino acids when they pass their spermatophores on to females as nuptial gifts. If the ground is too dry, they may “spit” on it to dissolve the salts they seek. They’ll even perch on turtles and crocodilians to sip their tears. Sometimes the insects become so preoccupied with drinking they’ll climb onto your finger and imbibe the sweat. To make a butterfly bar in your yard, fill a bucket with sand, bury it to the rim, and dump in water, beer, and fruit juice. Spring azures, carousing in the earliest of all drinking clubs, inspired Robert Frost’s poem “Blue-Butterfly Day,” which ends with: “And now, from having ridden out desire/ They lie closed over in the wind and cling/ Where wheels have freshly sliced the April mire.”

Bat Babies

No state in our union is free of bats—disheartening news, were any of the myriad wives’ tales about them true. Bats are not particularly prone to rabies. They’re unlikely to stink up your attic unless you block their exit holes before they leave for the winter. And it would take prodigious effort for a bat to become entangled in a woman’s hair—on the part of the woman, that is. Now female bats are bearing young. Of the 45 species in the United States, three you’re likely to see are little brown bats, big brown bats, and, in the East, tricolored bats (pictured here). When bats orbit at twilight, watch with binoculars and you may see a female carrying her blind, hairless pup, which she delivered only a day or two earlier, catching it in the skin that connects her back legs—the same membrane she uses to net insects. Toss a pebble skyward and watch bats veer toward it, as they pick it up with their “sonar.” The best way to attract them is to put up a bat house. For instructions, go to Bat Conservation International and search for “bat houses.”

Sweet Nothings

You can fool some of the bees all of the time, a fact on which the Calypso orchid—a.k.a., “fairy slipper”—depends. This diminutive wildflower—among the earliest bloomers in the northern coniferous forests of Eurasia, Canada, and the United States—has no nectar. But its purple-striped, yellow-fringed lower petal looks like something out of a candy store. There are always enough gullible bees to fall for the ruse. They enter hungry and emerge disappointed and covered with pollen, which, having learned nothing, they transfer to the next Calypso orchid. The plant is named for Homer’s sea nymph—famed for her beauty—who, lusting after Odysseus, detained him and his crew for seven years on the isle of Ogygia. Calypso orchids obtain nutrients from decomposing conifer needles via a partnership with fungi, so they’ll die if you try to transplant them.