Doing business with butterflies

Officials and companies in Wisconsin had to find ways to protect the habitat of an endangered insect and still do business successfully.

By Tom Meersman
Star Tribune Staff Writer

Butterflies and business don't usually go hand in hand, but a new public-sector/private-sector program in Wisconsin is successfully protecting the endangered Karner blue butterfly. It's strategy may in fact become a national model.

    The Karner blue, about the size of a postage stamp with its one-inch wingspan, once could be found all across the northern United States from Minnesota to New York, but it lost much of its habitat to agriculture, logging and development. Today it lives almost exclusively in central and northwestern Wisconsin in open, sandy areas with scattered oak or pine, where the wild lupine plant grows. The lupine is the Karner blue's sole source of food during its caterpillar stage.

    Because of the Karner blue's dwindling national population, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service listed it as an endangered  species in 1992. That was a red flag to Wisconsin landowners, because the Endangered Species Act requires that rare insects, animals and plants be protected, typically by restrictions that do not allow land-disrupting activity.

     The problem for Wisconsin was that the Karner blue's habitat included 260,000 potentially disruptible acres, much of that area along utility and roadway rights of way and in agricultural fields, forest lands and military training areas that support wild lupine plants.

    Timber and paper companies wanted to continue harvesting trees, towns wanted to mow their roadsides, utilities wanted to keep trees and shrubs away from power lines and underground pipelines, and county land administrators wanted to create fire breaks within the forests they manage, yet all of those routine activities appeared to be illegal as of 1992 because of the imperative to protect the little blue butterfly.

    "We wanted to avoid a train wreck like the spotted owl in the Pacific Northwest," said Dave Lentz, conservation biologist for the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, referring to the years of animosity -- and a long series of lawsuits and appeals filed by environmental groups and lumber companies -- about cutting old-growth forests. "We needed to find a way to live with an endangered species and still be able to manage land without economic barriers or social stigma," he said.

To Protect and develop

    It took five years of meetings and consultations, but Lentz and others came up with

a solution. Last fall, 26 partners, including utilities, state agencies, counties, conservation groups, timber companies and private landowners, signed a voluntary but legally binding agreement that spells out how each of them will minimize disruption of the butterfly's life cycle on land that they own or manage. In exchange, the partners will not be prosecuted if some of their actions occasionally result in destroying wild lupine or disrupting other elements of the butterfly's habitat.

    The deal, known as a habitat-conservation plan, is allowed by the Endangered Species Act. More that 250 such plans are in effect around the country, but nearly all involve only a handful of partners and relatively small areas of land. The Wisconsin project is unique because is includes so many partners and virtually the entire range of the butterfly.

    For the Timber Co., a subsidiary of Georgia-Pacific Corp., which owns about 70,000 acres of butterfly habitat in central Wisconsin, the agreement means that herbicides will be used only in late summer after the lupine has stopped blooming and the Karner blues have laid their eggs (which will remain dormant over the winter).

    "We need to control wood vegetation and dense sedge that compete with newly planted trees," said Kit Hart, the company's senior wildlife biologist. But certain herbicides can be chosen for application in late fall, he said, so that neither the lupine plants nor the eggs are damaged.

    Ironically, one of the characteristics of lupine is that it thrives in disturbed lands; the plant evolved in relatively open areas that were grazed by buffalo and, later, elk, and were often subject to wildfire. The Karner blue's listing as an endangered species could have prohibited and disruption whatsoever, thereby enabling trees and shrubs to grow up and shade out the lupine, leading to the further demise of the butterfly.

   Hart said that the conservation plan will allow timber harvesting for wood or paper production under certain conditions, and that this will be salutary, because the logging will open up more space for wild lupine to grow for a few years until the areas are reforested. What that means, he said, is that lupine-growing areas will change in a "shifting mosaic" as different parcels are logged over the years, while the overall habitat for the butterfly will not be reduced.

    Bob Borth, a tax manager for Wisconsin Gas Co., which maintains underground pipelines that run through the Karner blue's habitat, said the agreement means that mowing

grass along the company's right-of-way must be done late in the season -- at plant heights of 6 inches or more -- so that the butterfly eggs closer to the ground will not be destroyed. Also, although the company may need to disturb lupine in the future to expand its service territory, this will be preceded by careful study so that there will be no net destruction of the butterfly's habitat.

    For Borth, who is an amateur lepidopterist (expert on butterflies and moths), the main advantage of the Wisconsin plan is not just preserving one species but increasing public awareness about protecting the oak savannas and pine barrens as ecological systems.

A poster child

     "The Karner blue is kind of the poster child," Borth said, "but other species are just as rare, if not more endangered, in the state." He cites, for example, the frosted elfin butterfly, which also requires lupine as its sole caterpillar-stage food source.

     Heidi Rahn, environmental consultant with Alliant Energy in Madison, Wis., said her company's 520 miles of pipelines and electric-power lines also need to be kept free of trees and woody debris. "We have great habitat for lupine," she said.

    As part of the butterfly protection agreement, Alliant now avoids spraying herbicides anywhere near lupine sites during spring and summer, and tree trimmers and other crews exert special vigilance in such areas.

    Lupine-rich sites are often identified using global positioning systems and can be located well in advance of maintenance; this is especially useful when rights-of-way are cleared in early spring, when the lupine plants have not yet emerged and may even be blanketed in snow.

    Louis Locke, president of the Wisconsin Audubon Council and a retired wildlife biologist, said the Wisconsin agreement is a "noble experiment" and represents a sensible approach to protecting and endangered species without unreasonable restrictions. Locke is particularly encouraged that the partners have agreed to monitor both lupine and Karner blue populations on their lands to be sure that the conservation plan achieves its goals.

    "We didn't look for compromise in protecting only some butterflies in some areas," said DNR's Lentz. "We looked for successful strategies that would work for everyone, and we did so in a nontraditional way: voluntary conservation rather than regulation."