Date: 03/30/2014

Number: 1

Low spring butterfly counts in NC this year….

Since most of us are still cooped up indoors today, after a non-butterfly weekend, I decided to see just how slow and bad this spring has been for butterflying here in NC. So, I went back to the last 4 years of my Excel files, arranged sightings by date, and tallied the number of records from Jan. 1 - March 31 each of those years. Yes, we still have 2 days to go in 2014, but today may be a wash, and tomorrow sunny and mild will be good, but it is a Monday, when few of us are out. I'll re-check 2014 totals in 2 days!

To set this up, let me say that at the RDU airport, January was about 3-3.5 degrees below normal, February only 1.1 below normal (but was snowy and with lots of frozen precip), and March is now about 6.5 degrees below normal, one of our coldest March ever. 2013 was also very cold in spring, and we know that flight dates then averaged about 10-14 days later than normal. 2012 was VERY warm in late winter and spring and averaged about 10-14 days earlier than normal! I can't recall 2011, but is was apparently about normal.

So, here are the # of records in NC Jan - end of March (recall that a record is a species seen by an observer on a given day -- if you reported 6 species at a site on March 23, that counts as 6 records).

2011 -- 268
2012 -- 715 best spring in recent memory!
2013 -- 100 awful
2014 -- 71 worse than awful!!

So, considering the number of us who routinely report to carolinaleps, that means that the average field butterflier this spring has contributed maybe 3-4 records!! That's about it for me -- about 4 records all spring!
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Folks:

Thankfully, the big flurry of butterfly records submitted by about 10 folks on March 31 pushed us from a miserable 71 sightings to a more respectable, but still very low -- 107 records, for NC, from Jan. 1 - March 31. So, here are the revised totals of records for NC, during the first 3 months of the year. At least, we barely sneaked past last year!

2011 -- 268
2012 -- 715 best spring in recent memory!
2013 -- 100 awful
2014 -- 107 bad, but not quite awful; 36 records added just on Mar. 31

And, quite a few butterflies were reported today -- Tuesday, Apr. 1, so we are off to a good April!

Courtesy of Carolina Leps

Raleigh, NC

Latitude: 35.8 Longitude: -78.6

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