Travis Whitehead/Valley Morning Star
Visitors enjoy the festivities and activities during the 26th Annual Texas Butterfly Festival at the National Butterfly Center in Mission, which concluded Tuesday.
MISSION – A flurry of warm yellows and soft browns glitter in sunlight as tawny emperors rise for a moment before clustering around a log glistening with butterfly brew.
Bands of shocking blue pulsate to a mystical rhythm as a Mexican bluewing flexes for pictures on a Mexican wild olive.
Brash American snouts, petite grey hairstreaks and Phaon crescents clamor for space on heads of goldenrod, and a giant swallowtail charges madly through crucita mistflower.
And there’s always the snapping of cameras aimed like cannons firing at moving targets by visitors to the 26th Annual Texas Butterfly Festival at the National Butterfly Center in Mission – only they don’t shoot artillery, but magic bullets that capture moments of nature’s intimacy and store them in sanctuary.
Tuesday concluded three days of tours in which about 100 nature lovers traveled to locations throughout the Valley to see something new and glorious in the flight of wings and ever-changing color patterns in butterflies.
It was a fine resurrection from the dark time of the pandemic.
The butterfly festival typically attracts about 140 attendees.
The pandemic cancelled the festival in 2020, and numbers last year were low. This year, the times and places seem to be in a grand metamorphosis as life and vitality return.
“It’s been a fantastic festival,” said Marianna Trevino Wright, executive director of the National Butterfly Center.
“Following a couple of no and slow COVID years, it was wonderful to have so many new and returning visitors to experience the incredible volume and diversity of species that can only be found in the Rio Grande Valley,” Wright said. “Ecotourism is so important to our local economy, and without education there will be no conservation; so the festival’s return to nearly full power is good for all.”
Tuesday was the conclusion of a four-day event which began Oct. 29 with Community Day, a fine Saturday morning. Families descended on the center that day for fun, education and crafts projects.
Attendees from all over the country spread like seekers on pilgrimage to a sacred place, each searching for their own epiphanies in the curiosity pieces appearing in the gardens and thickets and seeking out the rarities pushed in by a southwest wind earlier in the week.
Parents introduced toddlers and children to the wonders and incantations betrothed by the separate rhythms and colors of butterflies. Bees and dragonflies add complex flavors to the palate of experiences being served to seekers young and old, and birds send musical announcements into the air, the trees and the shadows.
In the visitor’s center, Kyle Cruz chattered in the internal code reserved only for 2 year olds, eyes open and dancing as he beholds Norma Lynda Zepeda in a bold green dress. The color is captivating enough, but what he observes with a greater thrill is the malachite butterfly placed there by Nan Wilson.
Kyle’s mother Miranda had just heard about the butterfly festival while visiting Bentsen-Rio Grande Valley State Park right down the road.
“This is our first time,” she said, as Kyle looked around now at the people from places far away and near who looked over displays about owls and large photographs depicting butterflies and their metamorphic cycles.
“We were actually going to the other butterfly garden at Bentsen,” she said. “We are loving it. He loves seeing the butterflies.”
At Kyle’s urging, they headed toward the door to explore the park.
Meanwhile, Wilson had her tote bags spread across a table featuring birds from across the U.S.
A northern flicker presented itself in shades of red and green; a spiteful woodpecker drenched in personality glared at the world from the safety of its fabric housing; a pileated woodpecker in a red cap as if heralding the coming Christmas fed it’s young.
“This was my feel-good project during the quarantine,” said Wilson, an 80-year-old artist from Albany, New York.
“I have been coming here since 2006 before the Center was built,” she said. “You never know what you are going to see in the Center.”
She gestured now to Zepeda and pointed out how she’d actually placed the two faces of a malachite, one with wings out and the other folded. When Zepeda turned quickly, the two became a singular creature in flight.
“I am supposed to be Mother Nature,” Zepeda said with a childlike smile of pride. “This is the second year I did it.”
Attendees and tour guides began arriving earlier last week and were already taking possession of their discoveries with camera and butterfly lists.
“I drove here from Arizona,” said Bob Behrstock, who would serve as a festival tour guide for about the 15th time.
“The farthest west would be the garden at Falcon State Park, and the farthest east would be Boca Chica and up into Willacy County at a Fish and Wildlife tract, and then there are a lot of private gardens,” he said. “I love doing it.”
The tours took attendees to different parts of the Valley because specific butterflies are found in separate habitats throughout the four-county area, said Luciano Guerra, photographer, educator and social media outreach specialist at the Center.
“There’s the blue metalmark,” he said. “It’s a beautiful butterfly, especially the males, that is found in Brownsville. You’ll most likely to see that at Resaca de la Palma State Park and World Birding Center. Another one is called the xami hairstreak, which is found in an area not too far from SpaceX.”
The compass for nature lovers across the United States has pointed them for many years to the festival and the National Butterfly Center.
Here, they find daring representatives of habitats far beyond the Valley, many of them tropical species from Mexico. They make sporadic appearances, which create powerful visual encounters with their seekers, each a talking point for every visit.
“We have people coming down here from across the United States to add some of these tropical rarities to their life lists,” Guerra said. “They are here, and they see one or two butterflies they’ve never seen before. That makes the whole trip worthwhile.
One rarity spotted by assistant tour guide Ryan Rodriguez was the dusted spur wing.
“I spotted that Sunday of last week,” said Ryan, 15. “It was the fifth sighting in the U.S.”
Guerra points out that Jeff Glassberg’s book, “A Swift Guide to Butterflies of North America,” states only one other dusted spur wing has been spotted in the U.S., but someone else has said Ryan’s discovery was indeed the fifth.
Either way, it was an important find.
Saturday afternoon in the park, Ryan showed an inspiring familiarity with trails, trees, flowers, birds and butterflies presenting themselves to visitors.
“That’s a Laviana white-skipper,” he said without hesitation.
“That’s a tawny emperor, that’s a Carolina satyr, that’s a …”
And throughout the park spreads a delicious chaotic rhythm for all to see. The fiery skippers with their staring eyes; the yellow sulfurs dancing around like wood nymphs; giant swallowtails bouncing and rushing and rising and falling like sharp staccatos.
In the midst of this is a park filled with vendors offering games, stuffed animals and hot dogs. Volunteers from local high schools have set up games where visitors can win prizes by matching photographs of feet to the right birds. They play little “shell games” with cups and images of butterflies; they toss bean bags through holes cut into pictures of caterpillars and lady bugs and butterflies; they sit in on discussions about spiders and birds.
Jayden Morales gazes into plastic containers of squirming caterpillars, walking sticks and other conspicuous critters.
“I love butterflies because I love to see butterflies, and I have seen monarchs,” said Jayden, 9, who’d come with his family from Southern California.
His parents enjoyed watching their son’s enthusiasm so vividly displayed.
“It’s really nice,” said his father Ray Morales.
“This is actually the first time we came out here,” he said. “We’ve always wanted to come, but we never made it out here.”
And away from the vendors, butterflies perform their own ballads with such expert precision they easily bring them into complex harmonies that every can see, feel and hear.
