The last word: My friend the butterfly

In July last year, a butterfly landed on my shoulder while I was taking a break from my office one afternoon to talk business with a colleague. I was sure the butterfly would soon fly off. We were walking through a canyon of granite, concrete, and glass in downtown Washington, D.C., where I had never seen a butterfly before. Now I had one clinging to me. It migrated to my shirt collar and stayed there.

After half an hour or so, I decided that I should have a picture taken to record my new friend’s remarkable arrival out of nowhere. So together we ducked into a MotoPhoto shop on 19th Street NW, just north of L Street.

The gentleman running the photo shop seemed to find nothing unusual about a man walking around with a butterfly on his collar. I thought that his flash would scare the butterfly away, but as the man clicked away, my little pal stayed put.

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I decided to get the butterfly something to eat at the Smith & Wollensky steakhouse across the street. With my colleague, Catherine Antoine, I plunged into traffic, slipping between cars waiting for the light to change. Neither the noise nor the fumes seemed to bother the butterfly. At the restaurant’s door, I requested a corner table for “me, my colleague, and the butterfly.”

“Right away, sir,” responded our waiter.

Catherine and I ordered calamari and two glasses of Pinot Noir, and I asked the waiter to find something for the butterfly. The waiter returned with the night manager, who said that they had conducted a Google search that showed butterflies like overripe fruit. The butterfly took no interest in the chopped strawberries they prepared, though, and as I took out my credit card he left my shoulder for the first time, landing on the window blinds next to the table. Catherine managed to use her office identification card to coax the butterfly back to my shoulder.

Time flew by in various delightful conversations. Two hours after Catherine and I sat down, I paid the bill, saving the receipt as a souvenir, and decided to head home early. I phoned my wife, Muriel, to ask her to put off the movie she had planned to go to and wait for me, because I’d be bringing a butterfly home. At M Street, I hailed a cab.

Muriel and our daughter, Shauna, were waiting when the car drove up a half-hour later. I exited the taxi—very slowly—and took the butterfly straight to the empty birdbath in front of our house. Somehow we got the butterfly into the birdbath and brought him some chopped bananas and bright red and purple salvia from the garden. After clutching at each of the flowers, he settled on one bunch and embraced it.

I decided to call in witnesses, two of our most spiritually oriented neighbors, Gina Di Medio Marrazza and Elizabeth Sammis. Gina immediately pronounced the butterfly a reincarnation. It was someone from a past life who had come to visit. “He’s trying to tell you something,” she said. Liz had a more practical explanation. “This is a message to you, Dan,” she said. “It’s telling you to slow down. Come home earlier. Pay attention to what’s really important in life.”

Shortly after 8 p.m., with the light fading, we decided to leave the butterfly to the birdbath and our garden, which happened to be full of such butterfly-friendly plants as coreopsis, phlox, and even a butterfly bush. We figured that we’d just had an amazing experience, and now it was over.

But on July 11, the day after I met the butterfly, I was trudging up the front steps after taking the bus home when Muriel shouted, “He’s back!”

“I saw him,” she said. “He was hovering over the birdbath.”

At first, I saw nothing but our cherry tree. Finally, the butterfly landed on a dry spot on the edge of the birdbath.

I soon discovered our visitor could be easily identified. He was a red admiral, also known as Vanessa atalanta, described in several books as among the friendliest of butterflies. They’ve turned up on the summit of Mount Washington in New Hampshire and the corner of Wall and Broad streets in New York’s financial district. They can be found as far north as southern Canada, as far south as Guatemala, in most of Europe and Central Asia, and in parts of North Africa.

In the D.C. area, the red admirals appear to be among the most common butterflies, although the average life span is just three weeks. They turn up on the edges of swamps and forests and even downtown, as I discovered. Based on my experience, they can be amazingly adaptable. I always thought of butterflies as dainty, but it appears that some can be quite aggressive.

According to the Kaufman Field Guide to Butterflies of North America, red admiral males are “especially pugnacious, darting out at almost anything crossing their territory, even humans!” I went over to where my red admiral was perched on the birdbath. He flew up, and at that point a minor miracle occurred. He was joined by another butterfly. I thought at first that it was a female and imagined that our butterfly had found a girlfriend. But I later learned that based on its flying behavior, the second butterfly was probably a male. The two butterflies flew in loops, what I came to view as a sort of spiral dance. Male red admirals typically chase one another to establish dominance over a particular territory. How could I be sure that my friend was male? No particular reason, just instinct. I came up with a name for him—Poppy—from the French papillon for butterfly. If I was wrong about his gender, Poppy would do just fine for a female, I thought.

So began a period of more than a month during which Poppy appeared 25 times.

At first, I told very few people about Poppy. I felt somehow that I needed to protect him. If I came home after dark, he wouldn’t show. But if I arrived at dusk, about 7:30 or 7:45, he invariably appeared. And day by day, he became, from my point of view, increasingly friendly and playful.

How did I know it was the same butterfly that landed on me each time? The answer was in his behavior. It was so consistent that it was hard to imagine another butterfly precisely duplicating it. Based on my research, it is rare for a butterfly to return to the same person time after time. Indeed, I at first thought that I must be having a unique experience. But Judith Shaw, a zoologist, alerted me to a report about a boy in California who once befriended a red admiral.

Gregory Richards, 9 at the time, had an amazingly similar experience to mine, according to a story that appeared in the Los Angeles Times in July 1969. For 20 days, a butterfly believed to be a red admiral fluttered around and landed on Gregory when the boy played in the evening in front of his grandparents’ home. Gregory’s rendezvous with the butterfly, named Mr. Flutter by his grandmother, occurred daily, usually about 7 p.m.

Richards, now 48, reached by phone at his home in Kingsburg, Calif., confirmed the story, adding that regular visits from red admiral butterflies occurred for three consecutive summers at his grandparents’ place. “I looked for him every evening,” Richards said of one of his butterfly visitors. “But if other kids were around, he wouldn’t come close to me.”

As early as July 12, Day Three of his stay with us, Poppy began to establish a pattern. He would emerge from the thick camouflage of the cherry tree, then drop down to the birdbath and land on the top of the lamppost. I found that once he settled, I could come within 6 inches of him and say a few words without disturbing him. He would sit at first with his wings closed, the scales on their underside looking like dried leaves—a sort of camouflage. But then he would slowly open his wings, showing the bright orange-red bars that make this butterfly so easy to identify. It was a gesture that I saw again and again, and I took it as a sign that he knew I wouldn’t harm him.

On Day Five, July 14, Poppy tried something new. He danced in the air and landed on the lamppost and birdbath, but this time he also landed on my head briefly. Then he teamed up with his partner again. Finally, two more red admirals joined them and they all chased one another in loops and eights. From then on, it became almost routine for Poppy to land on my head once or twice in an evening.

On July 21, Poppy launched into an even more playful phase and kept a closer watch on me. He appeared at the front door of the house and fluttered about as if inviting me out to play. When I came out to greet him, he hovered, waited until I got within inches of him, and then darted around the corner as if playing hide-and-seek. I found him clinging to the brick front of the house. When I approached, he opened his wings to display his brilliant colors.

The next evening, I missed the usual hour of Poppy’s appearance. After dark, when I returned to the house, Muriel told me that at dusk Poppy had shown up several times at the dining room window as she and Shauna were having dinner. He seemed to be looking in, waiting for me to appear.

August began with more butterfly duets and head and shoulder landings, but I also started preparing myself for Poppy’s departure. Red admirals sometimes migrate, and I clung to the idea that my butterfly friend would soon head southward to a nice setting in Florida just ahead of winter. I later learned that this was a bit of a romantic notion at this stage in the butterfly’s life and that he probably faced imminent death. Other red admirals at this point were nowhere to be seen. Poppy seemed to be on his own.

On Aug. 15, I stood outside for half an hour waiting for Poppy. Then I gave up, guessing that he was gone. Suddenly he flew overhead near the cherry tree. He soared fairly high, so high that I lost sight of him. I’d like to think that it was a final salute. I never saw him again.

I later described my experience to one of the most respected experts in the field, Bob Robbins, curator of lepidoptera for the Smithsonian Institution. Robbins said much of the red admiral’s behavior in the evenings related to staking out territory and perching to look out for female butterflies. Robbins thought it unusual that the same red admiral would stay in my garden for more than a month, but he conceded that the butterfly’s consistent behavior might mean it was indeed the same male butterfly. The fact that a butterfly would stick with me in a photo shop, stay on my shoulder for more than an hour in a steakhouse, and then ride home with me in a taxicab, he said, was “really, really unusual.”

I asked Robbins if he was aware of butterflies living in downtown Washington. “They’re there, but they’re not very conspicuous,” he said. “They’re not very happy there. They don’t like the noise, the cars, and the pollution.”

Well, I can certify that at least one D.C. butterfly managed to escape that fate, take a taxi ride out of town, and survive to have the time of his life in the suburbs. And for 37 days, so did I.

From a story originally published by The Washington Post Magazine.

Used with permission of the author.