wild thing
Forestalling the Butterfly Apocalypse
By Rick Borchelt
It’ s sometimes called the“ windshield test.” Just a few decades ago, driving along a country road at night meant you’ d have a mess of dead insects on your windshield, often so many the windshield wipers couldn’ t keep up. Drive the same route today, and you hardly even need windshield wipers.
It’ s a test that even folks who are not inclined to worry about species and biodiversity loss understand. Scientists quantify the impact more precisely: One analysis of flying insects in Germany conducted over nearly 30 years in 63 nature preserves showed an 82 % decline in flying insect
A Great Spangled Fritillary alights on a thistle.
Photo: Judy Gallagher
biomass over the years the studies were conducted.
Butterflies are one of the most critically imperiled species in this insect apocalypse. Here in the U. S., a 2025 study published in the journal Science notes, butterfly data from more than 76,000 surveys across the continent confirm a grim situation. Over the two decades from 2000 to 2020, total butterfly abundance fell by 22 % across the 554 species counted.
“ Our study found that the total number of butterflies declined by 1.3 % a year. That may not sound like much, but it adds up quickly, and it means we’ ve lost more than 20 % of butterflies in just 20 years,” said Collin Edwards, lead author of the study.“ This is a wake-up call for the need to conserve butterflies and their habitat.”
Luckily for us, the Agricultural Reserve does just that.
Summer in Montgomery County is high season for butterflies— both diversity and raw numbers of butterflies usually peak in the fields and roadsides here in June and July. Their numbers reflect the profusion of blooms, and their nectar, available at midsummer. Notable nectar providers for butterflies, and other pollinators, include milkweed, dogbane, and various thistles. All thrive in the agricultural patchwork the Reserve provides.
Butterflies( and moths) belong to a group of insects that naturalists call the Lepidoptera, from the Greek meaning“ scale wing,” referring to the tiny scales that cover a butterfly’ s wings and give them their iconic colors. If you’ ve ever held a butterfly, you probably noticed that your fingertips were covered in a dusty powder— these are the scales from the butterfly’ s wings, and you might have seen that the wings beneath the scales are nearly transparent.
Another characteristic of Lepidoptera is that they have four life stages: egg, larva( which we call a caterpillar), pupa( inside a hard case for most butterflies, in a silken cocoon for most moths), and the adult butterfly. All four stages abound at the height of summer, even though our eyes are mostly drawn to the brightly colored adult butterflies.
Few butterflies signal summer’ s arrival in the county better than the hairstreaks, some of our
20 plenty I summer growing 2026