HOWE — You can learn a lot from a butterfly.
Blue Heron Ministries, an Angola-based land trust organization, is about to start a three-year-long, $270,000 project aimed at restoring a 70-acre wetland area recently acquired by the LaGrange County Parks Department and added to its Pine Knob Park just east of Howe.
The wetland area, known as a fen, is exceedingly rare. Previous landowners had tried to make it more productive by digging ditches to drain the water, destroying the fens.
But before the restoration project can begin in earnest, Blue Heron volunteers are planning to launch a butterfly monitoring program aimed at counting and identifying the butterfly population found in the fen. By actively and precisely monitoring the butterfly population, Blue Heron staff and volunteers say they will be able to monitor the health of the fen as it’s restored.
“We need to incorporate some form of animal life study into our project, and butterflies can be a really good indicator species,” John Brittenham, a Blue Heron staff member, said Friday morning at a meeting between a Michigan conservation expert and volunteers willing to help establish a butterfly monitoring program at the park.
Butterflies are sensitive to even small changes in their environment, and those changes can be charted by monitoring the up-or-down swing in butterfly population numbers.
In order to start a scientifically accurate monitoring program, volunteers have to be trained to use standardized methods of counting and identifying butterflies. Kalamazoo Nature Center’s conservation research coordinator, Kyle Bibby, was invited to speak to the volunteers at Friday’s first meeting and explain what would be expected of them over the course of the monitoring program.
The Michigan-based nature center was the driving force behind the 2011 launch of the Michigan Butterfly Network, which will oversee the LaGrange County butterfly monitoring program.
The program volunteers will travel to Kalamazoo next month to start a two-day butterfly monitoring training session at the nature center, and learn specific techniques and protocols required so the data they collect can be considered scientifically valid.
Once trained, the volunteers — or citizen scientists, as Bibby referred to them — will make biweekly excursions over the course of the summer into specific portions of the park to establish a count of butterfly population.
Volunteers will work in teams of two, with one volunteer doing the actual observations while the other volunteer writes down those observations in a scientific journal. Data gleaned by the project this summer will be compared to data collected in the coming years.
The former Juday family property recently added to Pine Knob Park plays host to a number of different ecosystems, including the fen. The Duff Lake fen, as it is called, is almost 70 acres, nearly two-thirds of the Juday family’s gift to the LaGrange County Parks Department.
A fen is described as a peat-forming, groundwater-fed wetland, know for spongy soils containing high nutrient levels that support diverse plant and animal species.
The restoration work undertaken by Blue Heron Ministries on the fen is the biggest project in the history of the organization, Brittenham said.
The Duff Lake fen restoration project could potentially become a new home for one of the world’s rarest insects, the Mitchell’s Satyr butterfly.
“We know it’s not on the site, and the fen is its habitat,” said Blue Heron Executive Director Nate Simons of the rare butterfly. “There are working groups in Michigan right now trying to figure out how to conserve this species and possibly reintroduce it. So wouldn’t it be wonderful if this site becomes a potential site for reintroduction down the road once it’s restored? But that’s way out there at this point.”
Simons said the real purpose in including the butterfly monitoring program in Blue Heron’s restoration project is its ability to show real-world data that demonstrates the success of the fen restoration.
“We’ll take the baseline data and be able to show, hopefully, as the restoration ages that we have increased the habitat for X number of butterfly species,” Simons said.
Work on the restoration project begins next month, when Blue Heron staff and volunteers use both fire and targeted herbicide applications to kill off non-native plants.
Simons said attempts to drain the land have severely degraded the natural fen. The restoration work is being paid for through a grant funded by the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation and administered by the LaGrange County Community Foundation.
“Hopefully, by late summer of 2016, we’ll actually start moving earth back into the ditches and spend the last year of the grant touching up on invasive species control, seeding and the rest of the project’s final steps,” Simons said.