Chinn eyeing Glacier Park butterflies for 25 years

Bob Chinn has been visiting Glacier National Park for 25 years, each time hoping to visit a new place and to see a new species.

“I hike with the speed of a tortoise and rest like a hare,” Chinn, a retired educator from Illinois, quipped during a recent talk at the Park.

An accomplished videographer and photographer, Chinn’s latest effort has resulted in an eBook, “Lepidoptera of Glacier National Park,” now available online through the iTunes store.

Lepidoptera is the large order of insects that includes butterflies and moths. For the past several years, Chinn has explored the Park’s landscape looking for what he calls “flowers in flight.” Glacier Park may be known for its beautiful vistas, but there is much more if one is willing to look.

“The eye candy is the details,” he said.

Chinn’s interest in butterflies began when he was on a hike and couldn’t identify a butterfly he had photographed in the Park’s records. In the late 1980s, ecologist Diane Debinski studied the Park’s butterflies, and the Park’s museum has an extensive butterfly collection.

It turned out the butterfly Chinn had found had been reclassified under a different name. After that, Chinn became more intrigued by the Park’s butterflies, and began shooting video and photographs of them whenever he could.

Some of the first butterflies to emerge in Glacier Park each spring have actually hibernated over the winter, Chinn said. When they become active in the spring, they’re looking for a mate as well as food. The mourning cloak butterfly is one example.

While some butterflies are long lived, others live just a few weeks as winged creatures but will have multiple “broods” each year. One species of butterfly emerges as an adult several times over the course of a summer, with gaps where none are present as the species goes through its life cycle of egg, larva and pupa.

More than 100 species of butterflies and more than 35 species of moths inhabit the Park, Chinn said. The moth count was based on a study conducted over the course of just a couple of nights several decades ago. Chinn suspects far more species of moths exist but they haven’t been recorded.

Moths are harder to find than butterflies because most are only active at night. Moth vision is 1,000 times more sensitive to light than a typical butterfly’s, Chinn noted.

Chinn searches for butterflies across the Park, but meadows with flowers are some of the best places to look. Butterflies aren’t just attracted to flowers — they can also be found gathering on top of scat, particularly bear scat, which is high in protein and other minerals they feed on. Butterflies will also gather en masse at springs and seeps high in mineral content, which is known as “puddling.”

Chinn’s eBook sells for $3.99. Proceeds will go toward supporting Glacier Park’s museum collection. The book features 129 species and has 35 video clips of butterflies in action.