How One Man Single-Handedly Saved A Rare Butterfly Species That “Needed A Little Extra Help”
November 6, 2023 | Source: GoodGoodGood
One person can make a world of difference. Tim Wong, a senior biologist at the California Academy of Sciences, single-handedly brought a struggling butterfly species back to his home city of San Francisco.
“I became aware of the California Pipevine swallowtail — which is native here to San Francisco — a couple years ago,” Wong said in an interview with The Weather Channel this past summer. “I was looking into trying to create a pollinator habitat in my own backyard and I found that there were some native butterflies that needed a little extra help.”
Although the California pipevine butterfly was still common near the coast and in the Sierra foothills, they had all but disappeared from San Francisco. In the city, the species’ host plant — the California Pipevine — was extremely sparse.
“What I learned is that a lot of our native butterflies have really tight relationships with native plants and some types of butterflies may only feed on one native plant,” Wong told meteorologists Stephanie Abrams and Jordan Steele.