On a wing and a prairie: Puget Sound butterfly avoids extinction with human help

In a prairie full of wildflowers, Erica Henry got down on all fours, then ducked under a low mesh tent, one of 10 homemade enclosures dotting the open space of Scatter Creek Wildlife Area south of Olympia, Washington.

With a plastic bowl, she delicately scooped up a tiny jewel of an insect clinging to the tent: a Taylor’s checkerspot butterfly.

“It's got a black, fuzzy body,” Henry said. “They're surprisingly fuzzy.”

Each wing looks like a mini-masterpiece of stained-glass art, in orange, black, and white.

“This one is federally endangered. We are trying to recover its populations,” Henry said. “There are only a handful of sites where this butterfly still exists.”

Henry is a prairie ecologist with the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife.

Western Washington is known for its towering evergreen trees, but it is also home to shortgrass prairies, a favored habitat for butterflies.

As butterfly populations nationwide decline rapidly, these rare checkerspots appear to be making a comeback in some grassy corners of the Puget Sound region. And 20 years of intensive human effort has likely helped them rebound.

Henry gripped the checkerspot gently, pinching all four wings between her thumb and forefinger.

“The key is to have the wings under control, being confident and gentle,” Henry explained, endangered animal in hand. “If you're too dainty, they'll flop around and can hurt themselves.”

Biologists use lots of different technologies to keep track of their wild subjects and help them fend off extinction, a threat looming for thousands of species as humans occupy or pollute an increasing share of the planet.

Some salmon get tiny transponders injected beneath their skin. Migratory birds might get solar-powered satellite tags glued on their backs.

For her work with endangered butterflies, Henry uses a glitter pen.

“It’s very high tech,” she joked. "It's really easy to see when they fly around. It just stands out.”

Henry wrote on her own hand first to make sure the ink was flowing, so she wouldn’t scratch the butterfly’s delicate wing.

Then she gave the checkerspot its glittery number.

“This is 28. It's a female,” Henry said. “You can tell it's a female because it's big and fat. They're loaded full of eggs.”

Once the butterfly was labeled, Henry set her free.

“Whoop! There she goes!” she said as the checkerspot fluttered away.

Henry then walked through the camas, paintbrush, balsamroot, and blue-eyed Mary flowers to the next tent to mark and release more butterflies.

Few people get to see, let alone touch, these colorful creatures.

Each adult checkerspot only lives about one week. The entire season when Taylor’s checkerspots take wing lasts only a month.

These checkerspots were brought to the prairie as caterpillars, in deli containers, back in March. They were raised in greenhouses about 40 miles away.

“We take care of them from the time they're an egg all the way up until they become a butterfly,” said Trista Egli, a butterfly technician for the Sustainability in Prisons Project.

She is also an inmate at the Mission Creek Corrections Center for Women, near the town of Belfair in Mason County.

“I've been incarcerated for three years this month,” Egli said in May.

Egli is one of seven Mission Creek inmates who are raising endangered butterflies.

They do their work in greenhouses just outside the prison gates. A guard checks on them hourly.

“It's really just a great feeling being trusted to care for this endangered species. How cool is that, you know?” Egli said. “But also, it's a huge, huge privilege that we're given, and we take it very seriously.”

Egli said she’s proud to have cared for more than 20,000 checkerspots in her three years at Mission Creek.

Raising and breeding the butterflies has enabled her to start thinking about the future again.

“It's probably the most meaningful and fulfilling work I've ever done in my life,” she said.

Egli is serving a nearly nine-year sentence for a drunken hit-and-run. She drove into two pedestrians, one of whom was left brain damaged by the crash, in 2022.

“We deal with a lot of shame and guilt on a daily basis, just being incarcerated and the reasons that got us here,” Egli said. “And so for me, it's been a place where I've been really able to process through that and heal from those feelings of guilt and shame.”

She said tending the small creatures through their whole life cycle has been both intellectually challenging and spiritually rewarding.

“The experience is almost parallel, in a way, because the butterfly goes through this huge transformation, and it is held captive for a little bit while we're caring for it to help the species, and then it gets released,” she said.

Just as the caterpillars transform into butterflies, Egli said she sees transformations in the women that care for the butterflies. She expects to be released from her own captivity in January.

“It's funny," she said. "Sometimes I think, ‘Oh, we're saving these butterflies,’ but, deep down, they're kind of saving us.”

The Mission Creek Corrections Center for Women is closing in October due to state budget cuts. Department of Corrections officials say they hope to relocate the butterfly program to the women’s prison in Gig Harbor, though they have to move inmates before they can focus on butterflies.

In wet Western Washington, prairies need disturbance to survive, or Douglas-fir trees or the tenacious and invasive Scotch broom take over. Butterflies don’t do well with either type of encroachment.

For millennia, Indigenous people set fires to help prairies produce foods like camas roots, wild strawberries, and elk. But as Natives were dispossessed of their lands and burning was discouraged, prairies all but disappeared.

The 5,000-acre Nisqually Reservation was once mostly prairie. The 1,300 acres that remain under Nisqually control (after the U.S. Army took over most of the reservation in World War I to expand Camp Lewis) are now mostly forested.

“We've tried to restore a few prairie habitats to provide easy access to medicinal, traditional plants for our community members,” Nisqually Tribe natural resources director David Troutt said.

The Nisqually Tribe’s name for itself, Squalli-Absch, hints at prairies’ cultural importance. It is translated as “people of the river, people of the grass.” With funding limited, the tribe’s prairie restoration efforts have been limited.

“Prairie habitat is critical for us, no doubt, but salmon is our highest, highest priority,” Troutt said.

Some of the best prairie habitat for Taylor’s checkerspots is being saved just east of the diminished Nisqually Reservation, and in explosive ways.

Heavy artillery training at Joint Base Lewis McChord, south of Tacoma, keeps unwanted vegetation from invading prairies there.

“JBLM has 90% of the remaining prairie habitat in Western Washington,” said Dan Calvert with Joint Base Lewis McChord’s Sentinel Landscape Partnership.

That makes the military stronghold a butterfly stronghold, too.

The military base has to protect habitats under the Endangered Species Act. But Calvert says protecting prairies also serves military purposes.

“If you're not burning on a regular basis, you're going to get conifer encroachment, you're going to have Scotch broom, and that is bad for prairie habitat and the species that are there,” Calvert said. “But also, it doesn't support the kinds of land uses and training that that JBLM wants to maximize.”

Wide-open spaces are good for things like long-range shooting, skydiving, and off-road driving.

Beyond fires ignited by artillery blasts, the base sets fires intentionally to restore prairies. It also funds efforts to protect prairies off base from development to reduce conflicts with neighbors.

“Things like noise, like artillery, smoke — people close to the base, you don't want to have machine guns shooting close by developments,” Calvert said.

Off-base, Thurston County has a federally approved “habitat conservation plan” for endangered species that requires anyone developing prairie land to take measures to help protect prairie someplace else. Officials say the plan aims to balance economic growth and conservation.

These sorts of programs might evaporate soon. The Trump administration wants to re-interpret the Endangered Species Act so it would no longer protect species’ habitats.

“That'd be just devastating. I mean, that's just ridiculous, really,” Washington State University entomologist David James said.

“It's not just butterflies. Every organism is linked to their habitat,” James said. “Without the habitat, they don't exist. There can be no endangered species protection without that, really.”

Back at the Scatter Creek prairie, 2025 appears to be a banner year for the endangered checkerspots.

While his colleagues sprayed herbicide on invasive Scotch broom shrubs in another section of the prairie, Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife biologist Andrew Dechaine walked a transect through the wildflowers. He methodically counted every checkerspot butterfly he saw and narrated his findings into his phone as he walked.

“Two adults flying together at 6 meters,” Dechaine said.

He let his excitement spill into his science as more and more checkerspots appeared.

“Okay, three, together, flying, at 0.3 meters. Another one flying at 2 meters. Single checkerspot flying at .4 meters. Okay, let this roll, we’re getting some activity here, baby!”

The transect data can help scientists understand how well the captive-reared checkerspots fare and how much habitat they need to use before settling down to mate, lay eggs, and die.

Dechaine’s glitter-pen-wielding colleague, Erica Henry, said checkerspots were hit hard by the Northwest’s heat dome in 2021.

The plants they feed on, mostly the weed English plantain, withered.

The checkerspots evolved to eat native plants, especially paintbrush. As weeds replaced native plants in many Northwest lowlands, some checkerspot populations disappeared. Others adapted to depend on the now-common, invasive plantain. Both paintbrush and plantains produce glycosides, chemicals that help make checkerspot caterpillars toxic to their predators.

“Butterflies are more adaptable than a lot of people think, and so there is some room for adaptation,” David James said. “But if they can't cope, then they're not going to do very well.”

Taylor's checkerspot butterfly was declared a federally endangered species in 2013 and currently has 11 populations in western Washington, one in British Columbia, and two in Oregon's Willamette Valley, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Four years after the Northwest’s hottest week in history, the prairie pollinators seem to be bouncing back, though populations at Joint Base Lewis McChord are hard to track: The artillery impact area is mostly off limits to humans.

“They took a hit with the heat dome, and they are recovering from that, for sure,” Henry said. “This year is a great year for checkerspots.”

She estimated that thousands of adult butterflies were occupying the Scatter Creek prairies. Dan Calvert said 2025 was an exceptional year for checkerspots at Joint Base Lewis McChord, with at least 1,400 observed in one training area.

The partial data suggests that Taylor’s checkerspots are doing better than most American butterflies.

“Overwhelmingly, more species are declining than increasing,” Henry said. She coauthored a recent study in the journal Science on the rapid decline in butterflies nationwide.

In the United States, most of these charismatic insects are fluttering toward extinction as their habitats shrink, get too hot, or are sprayed with pesticides.

The researchers found 107 species' populations had fallen by more than half, including 22 butterflies that plummeted more than 90%.

“We've really lost a lot in 20 years, which is not a very long time,” she said.

Scientists say habitat loss is the main culprit, though pesticides and climate change have also taken a toll.

“There's teeny, tiny fractions of the extent of grasslands that used to cover this continent, and so any little remnant that remains, I think it's worth preserving and protecting and restoring,” Henry said.

Starting in January 2026, “neonicotinoid” pesticides, widely used but harmful to bees and butterflies, are prohibited for nonprofessional use in Washington, though they remain the most popular type of pesticide for farmers.

“We really need to do what the Europeans are doing, which is just banning them outright,” said James, whose work involves helping hops and grape growers control pests without pesticides.

Despite ongoing threats, there is a bright spot for checkerspots and other butterflies: They respond fast to changing conditions.

“If conditions are good, populations can really explode, and so they can recover from bad years pretty quickly,” Henry said.

The checkerspots’ rapid response means efforts to save the species or its habitat can yield fast results.