No Greenhouse Required

If, like me, you have spent countless sweaty hours in humid butterfly pavilions listlessly tailing a butterfly obsessed child (well, actually she’s obsessed with unicorns, but butterflies come a close second), not to mention trying to persuade a 5-year-old that catching butterflies and keeping them in glass jars isn’t particularly humane, then you’ll love this news too.
The Audobon Society Of Rhode Island’s annual butterfly count in the East Bay found a black, white and orange blanket of butterflies in a privately owned Bristol field (location is TBD, but I bet my daughter can sniff it out). They’re Baltimore checkerspots, which apparently don’t usually make it this far north in large numbers. But a naturalist told the Projo that they’ve been multiplying here since they started feeding on English plantain, an invasive weed now common here.
Checkerspots are the official arthropodic emblem of Maryland, where the summers are as hot as this one has been here. In such abundance, perhaps my child will be content to just look at them, maybe chase them a little, then leave them to get on with their brief lives, another reminder that nature is something we can’t control or predict.