When the Mountain State’s ephemeral wildflowers burst into bloom from March to May, they invite a special guest: the West Virginia white butterfly. Not to be confused with the common cabbage white, this fifty-cent-piece-size woodland butterfly with cream-white wings veined with smoky gray emerges just once a year. “There’s a lot happening for this species in the course of roughly a month,” says Jakob Goldner, a conservation entomologist with the West Virginia Division of Natural Resources. “The adults have to emerge, feed on nectar, mate, lay eggs, and then the caterpillars have to hatch, grow, and then create their chrysalises before their host plants die.” Then, the insect remains in the chrysalis, tucked into leaf litter on the forest floor, until next spring. The butterfly faces many threats: invasive garlic mustard, which resembles good host plants like toothworts but is toxic to the caterpillars, forest fragmentation, climate change, and overgrazing by deer. But for now, populations are still holding out in the Monongahela National Forest in the Allegheny Mountains and Kanawha State Forest—look for a flash of white fluttering at knee-to-waist height among spring wildflowers, like cutleaf toothwort.
Southern Agenda