The Taylor’s checkerspot butterfly was thought extirpated from Canada until a small population turned up on Denman Island. Bringing it back from the edge has meant an unusual partnership: conservationists, biologists, and incarcerated women in a prison-based captive-breeding program, all working to raise butterflies for release back into Gulf Island grasslands.
Brian Payton’s reporting for Hakai Magazine follows the program from the breeding enclosures to the restored meadows on Denman and Hornby where the butterflies are released, and the volunteers and researchers who’ve spent years rebuilding habitat one patch of camas and buttercup at a time.
A story about how much work, and how many unlikely hands, it takes to save a species most people have never heard of.
