News
Have you noticed enormous swarms of Red Admirals in your area? Observers throughout Iowa have been reporting huge outbreaks of Red Admirals along particular stretches of roadway, most of which are near the floodplains of streams and rivers. One of the first of these outbreaks to be reported was discovered on the road west of Luther, Iowa, which crosses the Des Moines River. The number of flying butterflies started increasing at the western edge of Luther, and seemed to grow exponentially for the next several miles until they peaked near the river, where perhaps several thousand butterflies were swarming at any one time. They seem to be concentrated in a belt along the river and extending two to three miles on either side of it.
These butterflies had nearly all emerged recently, and had most likely fed as larvae on stinging and wood nettles that are especially abundant in floodplains. If the kind of outbreaks now happening in Iowa are also occurring elsewhere in the Midwest or in other parts of North America, the Red Admiral summer generation this year could be enormous, perhaps one of the largest ever observed.
Royce Bitzer, June 30, 2015
The first arrivals of the western Painted Lady migration reached the Seattle area on April 30. They had probably flown northward from where they had been concentrated in southern Oregon and northern California.
-- Royce Bitzer, May 6, 2015
Red Admirals have been migrating northward through Iowa in larger numbers beginning on Sunday, May 3. Some Red Admirals have been here for the past few weeks, but the larger numbers we’re seeing since this weekend appeared rather suddenly here in central Iowa on May 3, migrating northward, and they still continue to do so. They arrived in Story County, Pocahontas County, and doubtless in many other parts of the state at this time, flying toward the north-northeast. They probably came with the arrival of the first warm, humid air mass to reach our area this spring. When the winds picked up from the south, so did the butterflies, riding the wind flow northward from some as-yet-unknown area to the south.
Accompanying this wave of Red Admirals has been a relatively small number of American Ladies traveling northward with them.
From where have these butterflies been coming? Have any observers in states south of Iowa been seeing this migration before May 3?
-- Royce Bitzer, May 6, 2015
The Red Admirals are out in central Iowa! I saw the first one on April 17, but then it got cold for the next week and I didn't see any more. But then we had a beautiful sunny day in Story County on Sunday, the 26th, and a group of us saw three flying around at East Peterson Park in the early afternoon. Then yesterday on the 27th, I spotted three more while surveying the Iowa State University campus on another bright, sunny afternoon after 5 p.m. So who else has been seeing them in Iowa or elsewhere around the Midwest? Please keep us posted!
--Royce Bitzer, April 28, 2015
At this time in late April, Painted Ladies have been abundant in northern California and southern Oregon for at least the past two weeks. Some of the butterflies may have been continuing to migrate northward in southern Oregon, but this activity was not definite - the butterflies were nectaring on dandelions, and most seemed to be flying northward when they left the flowers, but the direction wasn't as obvious as it had been in late March.
Are other people elsewhere in northern California and the Pacific Northwest seeing more Painted Ladies this spring? What's happening in Portland? In Seattle? Elsewhere? With more of us reporting, we can get closer to figuring out the actual extent and timing of this Painted Lady irruption.
-- Royce Bitzer, April 28, 2015
The menu items under migration and perching/territorial behavior were rearranged, and a paragraph was added at the beginning of "Observing Migrating Butterflies" to distinguish between casual and more detailed ways of watching and reporting migrating butterflies. In other words, you don't necessarily need to do everything on this page to report a sighting for the map - often a short note of which way you saw them flying is just fine.
--Royce Bitzer, April 21, 2015
A large backlog of observations from the enormous Red Admiral migration of 2012 is gradually being added to the map and database. These had been received as e-mailed reports when our previous database had been offline for some time. They are being entered in order by observer. In other words, I'm entering all the sightings I received from one observer in 2012 before moving on to the sightings from the next observer on the list. It may take a while, but once these sightings are all entered, the map will certainly be a very impressive and useful record of the 2012 migration!
--Royce Bitzer, April 3, 2015
Painted Ladies have been seen migrating northward in southern Oregon for perhaps the last two weeks. Two reports from Klamath Falls, Oregon were received on March 30 and 31, 2015. This migration may be continuing from an earlier migration observed from February 16-25 in the vicinity of Los Angeles, California.
--Royce Bitzer, April 2, 2015
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