Sunday, Oct. 16, 2005 | 9:49 a.m.
It's been a good year for painted ladies in Southern Nevada.
We're not talking about the "working girls" in Pahrump, but the butterflies that are crowding the Spring Mountains and other oases throughout the region. Generations of the orange, brown and white painted ladies and their close kin, red admirals, have been born, mated and reproduced this summer.
Local butterfly observers say last year's relatively wet winter, which broke five years of punishing drought, helped feed this bumper crowd with a healthy growth of vegetation. In the Spring Mountains and other areas, bright yellow swaths of rabbit brush are in bloom, providing some of the butterflies favorite food.
Carlos Cornejo, manager of the Torino Ranch on Mount Potosi, said he's seeing great crowds of the butterflies on the rabbit brush -- also known as yellow flowering sage -- and the aptly named butterfly bush on the ranch grounds.
"They really seem to like that," he said.
And what's good for the butterflies is even better for Carlos.
"I love 'em," he said.
Bruce Boyd, a Henderson resident, has spent more than a decade professionally tracking butterflies and other wildlife in Southern Nevada. Boyd said there are a number of species fluttering about, but mostly, people are seeing the painted ladies.
"This spring we had a pretty good migration," he said. "They breed their way north as the weather permits. They're beginning to move south again, that's why we're seeing them."
As long as rabbit brush and other late-season flowers are in bloom, "the butterflies will be abundant," Boyd said.
The naturalist said that even if Nevada gets a shot of cold weather this weekend, most of the butterflies will remain.
"They can take quite a bit of cold weather," he said. "They might not be as frequent at higher elevations, but they'll still be there at lower elevations and will continue to move south. This should go on for a while."
Boyd, who is 54 and does field work full-time for various federal, state and local agencies, this week checked a swath of rabbit brush about 10 miles north of Searchlight and found the flowers thick with the butterflies.
Red admirals and painted ladies -- and there are actually three similar but distinct species -- are the most common now, but observers will see the similarly colored but larger monarchs, sleepy sulfurs, orange sulfurs and the aptly dubbed Reakirt's blue.
Barbara Adams, curator of the Nevada State Museum, agreed that the year has been good for the insects.
Butterflies, most will remember, start out as caterpillars. Painted ladies take just a few weeks to go from caterpillar to breeding adult, Adams explained. That allows generations to move north in a single spring, summer and fall.
"There have been a lot of them. We had such a rainy winter. If there is a lot of rain and therefore a lot of food, they hatch out a lot of them."
While most people will just appreciate the butterflies because they're pretty, Boyd said they can be very important for the local ecosystem. Predators such as spiders, birds and lizards make a meal out of the small aviators.
"Very often, when I'm in the field looking at butterflies, there will be lizards up in the plants," he said. "The lizards will be sitting up there feeding on them."
Of about 200 species of butterflies native to Nevada, many have very limited regional distribution or are just very rare, Boyd said. Their relative fragility makes them a good "indicator species" for the health of an ecosystem.
"The reason they are used as indicator species is because there's so much known about them," Boyd added.
Laraine Harper, general manager at Sheri's Ranch, a Pahrump brothel, has some experience of her own with painted ladies -- both the human and winged varieties.
"I think they're beautiful," she said, referring to the butterflies. But Harper noted that the young ladies at Sheri's Ranch are also indigenous to the desert.
"I actually think my ladies are prettier than the butterfly."
Launce Rake is a reporter for the Sun. He can be reached at (702) 259-4127 or by e-mail at [email protected].
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