CONSERVATION FOR THE REALIST

There’s just something about watching a grown man leaping over sage brush and tumble mustard, waving a mesh net around, outmaneuvered by a butterfly.

Since 2023, AmeriCorps volunteers have been brought into the Southeast Idaho Refuge Complex to primarily conduct pollinator surveys. The title “pollinator surveyors” make us sound professional, but we are really just butterfly and bumblebee catchers, running around after bugs like SpongeBob runs after jellyfish.

As silly as this may seem, pollinator surveys are part of a critical, larger project that aims to protect the health, diversity, and ecology of southeast Idaho’s wet meadows. The surveys tell us which species of butterflies and bumblebees are doing well and which are not. We also collect flowering plant information in the areas we survey. This allows us to assess pollinator populations within the context of the local flowering plant populations.

Pollinators are bioindicators – they are a canary in the proverbial coalmine for ecosystem health and diversity. Many species of pollinators rely on a specific set of plants at specific times of year. By tracking the populations and seasonality of pollinators, we can better understand the makeup of our plant communities. By understanding where the gaps are in our plant diversity, we can learn how to better support both our vegetation and our pollinators. The health of our plant and pollinator communities echoes up the food-chain to elk, coyotes, and ultimately humans. Not to mention that, according to the USDA, healthy pollinator populations improve crop yields.

The data being collected shows trends in pollinator populations that closely mimic the abundance and diversity of available flowers throughout the season.

For example, early in the season we had TONS of tumble mustard in our survey sites, and we caught hundreds of butterflies from many different species. Our record was 27 butterflies within ten minutes at Minidoka National Wildlife Refuge. Not coincidentally, this survey site also had the highest density of tumble mustard.

Not long after, the tumble mustard’s season ended and it turned brown in preparation for winter. As the tumble mustard disappeared, so did the butterflies. We stopped catching Crescent and Copper butterflies. This is important because these species typically fly until September and October, respectively. However once the tumble mustard was finished, there was no other flowering plant to take its place in enough abundance to support them and their season ended prematurely in this survey site.

Pollinators require plants to nectar on throughout the spring and fall. For example, bumblebees fly in Idaho from early April to late August. For the entirety of those five months, they must have enough flowers to support healthy populations. The only bumblebees caught at Minidoka this season were in early August with a grand total of 12. In the locations we surveyed, there were not enough early or late flowering plants to support bumblebees, or butterflies for that matter. There should be a high enough diversity of flowering plants that pollinators have enough food from spring to fall. Without reliable food sources, their populations are at risk. The most glaring of these examples is the alarming decline of the monarch butterfly as milkweed, the only plant it can lay its eggs on, becomes less common throughout the monarch’s intercontinental migration route.

As this research continues, the things we are learning are being implemented in real time. With the pollinator season at a close, now is when the flowering plants go to seed. The seeds of native plants that were identified as valuable for pollinators – such as field mint, goldenrod, and sunflower – are being collected and stored for later planting in the greenhouse or dispersal in study areas. Minidoka is also in the process of creating a display native pollinator garden to demonstrate how anyone can incorporate native pollinator-friendly plants into their own gardens.

---

This article was written in collaboration with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Special thanks to Ty Matthews and Dana Duran.