The Butterfly Effect

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.

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. I began to keep a log of his comings and goings as well as of his stunts, which reminded me of a fighter pilot who fired no weapons but just loved flying.

At first, I told very few people about Poppy. I felt somehow that I needed to protect him. My cousin Phebe, who lives in a renovated log cabin near Lexington, Va., and is wise in the ways of nature, seemed to think the butterfly might be attracted to the white shirt I was wearing when I first encountered him on L Street. So for several days, I put on the same white shirt every evening and then waited for the butterfly in front of my house. A neighbor walked by once and asked me what I was doing standing there in my white shirt.

"Looking for butterflies," I replied. But I decided that the shirt couldn't be the only attraction. I learned that butterflies are strongly attracted to the salt in human sweat, so it looked as if it was the sweat, not the shirt.

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 a zoologist and amateur naturalist, Judith Shaw of Mitchellville, 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 United Press International 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. A local entomologist said he was amazed and couldn't understand what attracted the insect to the boy.

Richards, now 48, reached by phone at his home in Kingsburg, Calif., confirmed the story, adding that regular visits from a red admiral butterfly occurred for three consecutive summers at his grandparents' place. "I looked for him every evening," Richards said. "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. I couldn't see him there, but Muriel had an uncanny ability to detect his movements.

Then he would drop down to the birdbath and land on the top of the lamppost. I found that when he was on the lamppost or birdbath, I could come within six or seven 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.

One thing is certain: Almost