Butterfly Man Bags a Rare Bug

On a recent trip to Alaska’s coastal rainforest, Ken Philip bagged his butterfly.

Philip is an independent researcher from Fairbanks who knows more about butterflies than anyone in Alaska after chasing them across tundra and taiga for 35 years. As I wrote in a previous column, Philip let me tag along this spring as he collected mourning cloaks with his wooden-handled net. At that time, he expressed his desire to see and gather one of the few species of butterfly that had eluded him.

The zerene fritillary is palm-sized, has brown wings with black etching, and loves violet plants, on which it sets up colonies. Textbooks on butterflies list zerene fritillary’s range as no farther north than southern British Columbia, with the single exception of a tiny group in Alaska. Philip knew of their existence here, but the zerene fritillary is one of three Alaska species the 68-year old had not yet seen on the wing. To remedy this, Philip loaded his blue pickup—the one with the word INSECT on the license plates and “Alaska Lepidoptera Survey” on the door—and drove to Haines.

In 1949, a collector bagged several zerene fritillaries in Haines, a town at the northern end of Southeast Alaska best known for its annual gathering of bald eagles. One butterfly sat in a collection on the East Coast until Philip acquired it. He hoped to find specific information on where the man caught the rare insect, but “Haines” was the only detail available. Philip later met a fellow butterfly gatherer from Salt Lake City who in 1972 caught a few of the zerene fritillaries in Haines. The same man gave Philip directions to a wooded knoll where the butterflies sometimes wafted by, and that’s where Philip parked his truck. He sat waiting for a sunny day that would make the cold-blooded butterflies hit the air.

“I went to the inaptly named Sunshine Hill,” he said. “In the course of five days, there was one period of sunshine, for one hour.”

During that 60 minutes of sunshine, the butterflies rewarded Philip for his patience. Within 100 feet of his truck, he swooped up a zerene fritillary in his net, then two more. He pinched the insects on the thorax to paralyze their flight muscles, placed them in tiny envelopes, and then a metal Sucrets box.

“I was happy, very happy, for a short time,” Philip said. In an attempt for a sample size that was a bit more significant, he tried to get more butterflies, but the sun didn’t shine for the next three days.

“I took a 1,300-mile trip for three bugs,” Philip said, adding that he also caught about 300 more butterflies on the drive through Yukon Territory. He said he may return to Haines in early August to gather more zerene fritillaries, but there’s no guarantee of even one hour of sunshine.

Philip added the three butterflies to his collection of more than 100,000, an impressive gathering of Alaska insects that will someday reside at the Smithsonian Institution. With his recent success in Haines, Philip has seen and captured all but two of the 83 butterfly species that live in Alaska.

A man in Skagway caught one of the butterflies that Philip hasn’t seen in 1923, and biologist Audrey Magoun gathered the other when she was doing fieldwork in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. He said he may someday make a trip to ANWR or the Yukon Territory to see the species Magoun captured, but he may have to pass on the rare butterfly near Skagway.

“Getting near that one would involve climbing about 3,000 feet straight up,” he said. “I’m getting a little old for that.”