A New Volunteer Gig for the Conservation of Butterflies

Welcome to Poetry Friday! Our host this week is the super kind and talented Tabatha Yeatts. I’ll link to her post at the end today.

This past Sunday, my husband joined me on my new volunteer experience. We drove to a county two hours away to survey for Karner Blue Butterflies. Karner Blues are tiny blue butterflies with orange spots on the backs of both their forewings and hindwings.

They are endangered but have made a significant recovery due to concentrated conservation efforts such as the one I am volunteering for, organized by the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.

The United States Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) states this about the Karner Blue Butterfly:

“The Karner blue butterfly, an endangered species, is a small butterfly that lives in oak savannas and pine barren ecosystems from western Wisconsin and eastward to the Atlantic seaboard. Historically, it was found in a continuous band throughout its range, but today is found in portions of New Hampshire, New York, Michigan, Wisconsin and Ohio. Wild blue lupine (Lupinus perennis) is the only plant Karner blue larvae, or caterpillars, can eat. Even so, the range of these butterflies and that of their host plant do not completely overlap. Instead, Karner blue butterfly are found predominantly along the northern band of wild lupine’s range.”

– USFWS Website, 2026 –

There are numerous reasons for this butterfly’s decline, and they share characteristics with the plight of all pollinators. Loss of habitat and fragmentation of habitat are major issues. But to further complicate things for this tiny butterfly, the Karner Blue has very specific habitat needs because of where its sustaining life-cycle plant grows.

Wild Lupine or Lupinus perennis is the only plant that Karner Blue larvae eat. And Lupinus perennis only grows in sandy soils. There are specific sites in Wisconsin that provide these habitat needs, and at this time Wisconsin has the largest population of Karner Blues.

Adult butterflies feed on the neighboring nectar plants one finds in the sand barrens where the wild lupine grows. These include coneflowers, black-eyed Susans, hoary vervain, knapweed, native spotted monarda, New England asters, and more.

The survey for these butterflies takes place a couple of times a summer. They lay two broods, one in May and one in July. I was unable to do the one in May because I had not completed the training yet. But I surveyed twice in July. This is a conservation commitment, as the sites where these butterflies are found are not near me. They are also remote, so I recruited my husband to come with me to help. It turns out he is a better spotter than I! He’ll see a butterfly, and then I try to identify it.

We have to walk a certain distance in the sand barrens, count the butterflies after positively identifying them, and note the nectar species as well as the amount of lupine and canopy coverage. The records get put into iNaturalist and confirmed by a WIDNR (Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources) biologist who is in charge of the project.

If this all sounds familiar, it is because of my work with monarchs. I surveyed for them as well, several years ago. While I haven’t let my conservation of monarchs go, I needed to be involved in a project that was well run and had meaning for me. I had trouble finding the monarch sites to which I was assigned mostly because of a lack of a GPS signal and the possibility they were on private property. This program surveys public lands, for the most part, and I looked for a site I could survey that was public. Still hard to find? Yes, but we did it.

My interest in Karner Blues is not new. I taught my garden club students about them using a Venn diagram because they share some characteristics with monarchs. And I wrote poems about them. But until this experience, I had never seen one up close. They are indeed special, and I’m happy to have found a new project to volunteer for that fits my passions.

Today, I’ll share two Karner Blue poems I wrote. One appears in my poetry chapbook, Life’s Inspiration and Reflection in a Few Words (2022), and one is recent, which follows:

Tiny, timid, Karner Blue,  	 
What feeds a butterfly,   	 
Such as you?		      	 

Tiny, timid, Karner Blue, 		
Only one plant will make do		
To let you live and multiply		

Tiny, timid, Karner Blue			
What feeds a butterfly, such as you?	

© Draft, Carol Labuzzetta, 2026

And previously published in my chapbook (available on Amazon, here).

Another Butterfly

Oh, Karner Blue!

Where are you?
Knowing you might be near,
I filled my gardens with the wild blue lupine
you hold so dear.

A tiny specimen of Lepidoptera,
elusive to even those who would like to see 
you flitting and fluttering
in purple blooms along with the bee.

Another butterfly dependent on one plant's 
disaappearing habitat
unless you know where its at.

Sand prairie remnants are calling you home.
Oh, Karner Blue, don't be alone! 

© Carol Labuzzetta, 2022

Tabatha's post can be found at her website: The Opposite of Indifference. Thanks for hosting Tabatha.

Here is another article I wrote on Medium – shared via a friend link. I’d love it if you checked it out. Thanks. Well, the friend link doesn’t appear to be working. If you really would like to read the article, message me and I’ll send a link to you that might work better. Thanks again.

View at Medium.com