Restoring rare beauties: From coast to coast, dozens of U.S. butterflies are in trouble, inspiring a host of efforts to protect the beloved insects

摘要

Biologist Arthur Shapiro has been chasing butterflies since-he was a teenager in Philadelphia, He's netted them in exotic locales from the Alaskan Subarctic to the Andes. But Shapiro, a professor of evolution and ecology at the University of California—Davis, is also an expert on common North American butterflies, those familiar species that breed in home gardens and feed on plants at the edges and in'fallow pockets of modern cities, towns and suburbs. For more than 36 years, Shapiro, whose wild graying hair and beard call to mind a frontier mountain man, has regularly walked fixed routes monitoring butterfly populations at ten sites from Suisun Bay to the Sierra Nevada. Lately, his biweekly hikes have inspired mostly questions—and worry.