Field Notes––

Flights Of Idiocy:

Cabbage White Butterflies

By Dottie Evans

When I am in my dotage and they turn me loose in the Wandering Garden with a balloon tied around my wrist, I know exactly where they’ll find me when it’s time to come inside for tea.

I’ll be standing in front of a butterfly bush transfixed by the looping flight of the cabbage whites flying in bobbing circles past my nose, orbiting in pairs, “lurching here and there by guess” [and by golly?] as poet Robert Graves neatly described it in his poem about cabbage whites called Flying Crooked.

Their herky-jerky flight patterns might be enough to put me right over the edge. Follow them though I must, the cabbage whites never seem to land anywhere.

More likely, I won’t care where they are going. I will simply be delighted and charmed by their random fluttering, their fluffy white bodies, their powdery white wings with the smoky black-tinged edges. Mesmerized by the big black spots on their dorsal forewings.

Actually, I will probably not remember that one black spot means a male, and two spots mean female. No matter. They don’t hold still long enough to count the spots anyway.

Cabbage whites may be seen as early as April and as late as November depending upon the timing of the last and first hard frosts. Successive hatchings are seen almost continuously all season long, because it seems Pieris rapae has got a pretty efficient reproductive cycle. Only three weeks from adult to egg to larva to pupa to new adult. Impressive.

It’s the larva that does all the damage and causes vegetable farmers to wring their hands at the first sign of the velvety green cabbage worms chewing large holes in the leaves of their mustard family plants. That would be broccoli, cabbage (of course), nasturtiums, radish, and turnips, to name a few.

Yet there is always some kind soul who tries to point out the good –– like Louise Kulzer, who wrote about cabbage whites in her April 1993 Bug-Of-The-Month column.

“It’s not a pest at all,” Ms Kulzer gushes, “when compared with the cabbage root maggot.”

Remind me never to eat anything from the mustard family again.

When I looked up cabbage white butterfly in my dog-eared collection of Golden Nature Guide books edited by Herbert S. Zim in conjunction with other notable scientists in their fields, I found an interesting evolution had occurred in the way this butterfly has been characterized.

Page 17 of the 1966 edition titled Insect Pests showed a guy with a spray canister on his back blasting DDT or some other chlorinated hydrocarbon at his garden vegetables. In the following pages, the cabbage white was lumped in with other insect hoards that are destructive to crops, like the boll weevils, the aphids, and the grasshoppers. Also mentioned were those that bedevil humankind, such as bed bugs, chiggers, head lice, fleas, ticks, and mosquitoes.

The 1987 edition is titled simply Insects and is much more PC. It talks about natural or “biological” controls such as birds and other insects, and it refers “Important Insect Problems” to “your local County Agricultural Extension Agent.” The current emphasis seems to be on studying and collecting an insect species rather than wiping it out.

Nevertheless, the cabbage white is still on shaky ground. It is described as an “all-too-common species” that was “imported” from Europe into Canada and the Northeast in 1860. Dr Zim did not say why or how it was brought here.

By 1883, cabbage white butterflies had crossed the North American continent and reached California. Ten years later, they were in Hawaii. In 1930, they were found in New Zealand, and in 1938, in Melbourne, Australia. Only four years after that, they had crossed Australia, arriving in Perth in 1942. Quite an odyssey for an inch-long butterfly that lives only three weeks.

Idiotic flight pattern or no, the cabbage white butterfly is going places.