published on August 18, 2024 in Quick Update

For more than a decade, butterflies have repeatedly landed on me. I think Im blessed by the red a

For most Washingtonians, the arrival of spring means relief from the dreariness and gloom of winter. But I have an additional reason to hail the advent of warm weather and sunshine: the return of butterflies, particularly the red admiral — a species with which I have a special relationship.

Known to entomologists as Vanessa atalanta, the red admiral is mostly black, with white spots near the wing tips, orange bands on the hind wings, and a bright red band on the forewing. Some say its name is a permutation of the phrase “red admirable” — “admirable” meaning spirit or soul — which was often used in the 18th century, although Peter Marren, the author of an excellent book on butterflies, traces the name back to 1707 and the colors of a new British flag. Red admirals range across the United States, plus as far north as southern Canada and as far south as Guatemala. They can be found in Europe and Asia. They can migrate over long distances. They are also a friendly species and are known to sometimes land on people. And over more than a decade, they have repeatedly landed on me.

It all started on July 7, 2007, when a red admiral landed on my shirt collar as I walked along 19th Street NW near the office where I worked. This was a busy area of office buildings and automobiles, with little vegetation. It seemed an unlikely setting for a butterfly.

When my little friend didn’t take off after a half-hour or so, I had my picture snapped with it at a photography shop and then took it across the street into a restaurant. I called my wife from the steakhouse to tell her that I was coming home early and that I was bringing a butterfly. On M Street NW, I managed to get into a cab without dislodging my passenger. The butterfly shifted from my collar to my necktie, and we headed out Canal Road to my home in Maryland.

To my amazement, day after day after that, if I returned home before dark, the butterfly, which I recognized by one tattered wing, would come out from the garden to greet me. I named it Poppy, after “papillon,” the French word for butterfly.

I wrote about that encounter for The Post in 2008, but there has been more to the story. Since Poppy first landed on me, other red admirals have continued to visit me near my garden almost annually since 2010. They land only on me and no one else in my family, although they sometimes briefly touch my wife, Muriel, when she’s taking photos of me with one of them.

Most remarkable perhaps is that red admirals have also visited me in Minnesota and New York. On July 4, 2010, two showed up at my mother-in-law’s 90th birthday celebration in St. Paul. They landed on no one but me. The same thing happened on the eve of my daughter’s wedding in Upstate New York on Aug. 16, 2013. I was standing in a parking lot when two red admirals circled my head. One then dropped onto the pavement in front of me and opened and closed its wings for about 10 minutes as wedding guests streamed past.

Last year’s encounters with red admirals started unusually early, on May 27. One evening, Muriel and I were looking out the kitchen window when I thought I saw a leaf on the roof of our car. Muriel immediately recognized it as a butterfly. (Muriel’s almost always the one to spot the butterflies first. She sees things in nature that I regularly miss.) I’m sure it was waiting for me to come out and greet it. The last of the butterflies stayed until Aug. 13.

So what’s my peculiar attraction for butterflies? At a friend’s urging, I contacted Bob Robbins, a research entomologist and curator of lepidoptera at the Smithsonian Institution. He said that my first butterfly friend may have been attracted to my sweat; butterflies need salt, which sweat provides. A scientist neighbor and a medical doctor friend both suggested that what attracted the butterflies had to be something chemical.

But the problem with the chemical explanation is that the butterflies seem to wait for me, on my car or a bush, while I’m more than 20 feet away looking at them through a window. At that point, I’m clearly not projecting anything chemical very far. As soon as I go outside, they tend to alight on me.

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Naomi E. Pierce, a biology professor and butterfly expert at Harvard, wondered whether the color of my clothes might be a factor. But since they’ve landed on me whether I was wearing a white shirt or a blue shirt, we couldn’t determine a definitive answer.

In early September, I spent much of a day in the library at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology searching for everything I could find on red admirals, looking for something that might describe them landing on the same person year after year. Mary A.B. Sears, head of public services at the library, guided me to numerous sources. One ancient-looking file she pulled out of a drawer included a 1922 article by a professor with the University of Minnesota Department of Animal Biology on the taste organs or “contact chemo-receptors” of red admirals he had studied. It said nothing about butterflies landing on people as a reaction to these chemo-receptors, and I found nothing that came close to relating to my own contacts with the butterflies.

It’s possible that part of what’s happening here is that I’m sensitized to red admirals now. I notice them in my environs in a way that others, who haven’t had the same close encounters, do not. Yet that still doesn’t explain their repeated landings on me.

Once last year while standing in my garden, for no reason I can offer, I recalled a terrible scene I’d witnessed more than 50 years ago as a reporter during the Vietnam War. I was transported to a moment when I came upon a convoy of South Vietnamese refugees that had been hit by a North Vietnamese artillery strike. There were no survivors as far as I could tell. It was one of those things you can never get out of your head. Then a butterfly appeared. Was it trying to tell me something? Who can say? In the end, I’m left with a feeling of gratitude. I think I’ve been blessed by butterflies.

Dan Southerland is a former Washington Post foreign correspondent.