The Butterfly Effect

At 19th and M, with the butterfly on my shoulder, I hailed a cab. I immediately asked the driver to put up the windows so the butterfly wouldn't fly out. He quickly glanced back at me as though I must be slightly crazy but soon got used to the idea of chauffeuring a butterfly. During the cab ride, the butterfly stayed on my shoulder at first but then shifted to the middle of my necktie. We arrived at my home near Glen Echo and the Potomac River in about 30 minutes.

Muriel and our 20-year-old daughter, Shauna, were waiting when the cab drove up. I exited the car -- 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, to see the butterfly.

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, lilies, salvia, coneflowers and a single butterfly bush. We figured that we'd just had an amazing experience, and now it was over.

On July 11, the day after I met the butterfly, I returned home early. Muriel picked me up at the bus stop at 7:15 p.m. A few minutes later, I was trudging up the steps to the front door when Muriel almost shouted, "He's back!"

"I saw him in the air," she said. "He was hovering over the birdbath."

Then she spotted him among the cascading leaves of the cherry tree. I saw nothing but the tree. Finally, he 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 in locations as diverse as the summit of Mount Washington in New Hampshire and the corner of Wall and Broad streets in New York's financial district, according to a 2005 book by Rick Cech and Guy Tudor. They can be found as far north as southern Canada, throughout the United States, as far south as Guatemala, in most of Europe and Central Asia, and in parts of North Africa.

In southern Europe, red admirals migrate in large numbers, but they fly less frequently en masse in North America. Cech and Tudor have documented mass flights in the spring along the East Coast about once a decade in recent years, "often followed by precipitous population crashes."

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 along the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal, on the edges of swamps and forests and even downtown, as I discovered. And, 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.