Flight attendants
Thousands of flights take off from Atlantic City International Airport every year. Some of them are small, brown, and fuzzy.
Last spring, the Federal Aviation Administration joined a number of federal, state and university partners to help the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service search for the frosted elfin butterfly during its seasonal flight period.
The Service is proactively assessing the butterfly’s status and will make a determination about whether or not it needs federal protection in 2023. In the meantime, we want to know if the frosted elfin is still found in the places where it was known to exist historically.
And we need all the help we can get.
Native to 25 states, the frosted elfin is about the size of a quarter, camouflaged to blend in with its surroundings, and reliant on managed or disturbance-dependent habitat types, such as oak-pine barrens, oak savannas, prairie, and dry oak woodlands.
“It just so happens that places like airports, radar sites, and power line right-of-ways encompass some of the only instances of open, early successional habitat left,” said Mike Denisi, Wildlife Biologist for the FAA’s William J. Hughes Technical Center at the Atlantic City International Airport.
That’s because it requires regular maintenance. For thousands of years, this kind of habitat was maintained naturally by disturbances like wildfires, and intentionally through controlled burns set by Native Americans to clear forest undergrowth. In the Northeast today, undeveloped land is typically allowed to succeed into wooded lots or forestland.
“When it comes to an airport, the FAA requires they keep specific areas surrounding runways and approach zones clear of trees and obstructions for various safety and aviation-related reasons,” Denisi said.
“In areas lying outside of core safety zones, we’re able to mow just once per year in the cold-season months, maintaining conditions necessary for aviation and frosted elfin,” he explained.
The same goes for radar sites. Not only does this save time, fuel, and taxpayer money, but it also supports the early successional conditions necessary for the food plants frosted elfin need to survive: wild blue lupine or wild indigo.
Frosted elfin begin their flight period in late spring when wild indigo is about a foot high. They fly around to look for mates for about three weeks and lay eggs on the indigo, which their larvae need to survive.
There are three primary sites on the airport grounds that support frosted elfin populations, encompassing approximately 50 acres with additional pockets of their host plant in between. This arrangement enables individual elfins to get from one location to another, allowing gene distribution and an increased level of resilience.
But the airport contributes more than just acreage to frosted elfin conservation. It contributes information.
Surveys of the frosted elfin population at the FAA Technical Center were performed every year from 2003 to 2015. “That amount of information gives us a huge dataset to look for trends, and an opportunity to ask questions about what those trends suggest,” Denisi said.
Those trends can inform frosted-elfin management in Atlantic City, and in other parts of their range, from Florida west to Texas, and north to Ontario.
The Service’s effort to survey far and wide for frosted elfin motivated Denisi to relaunch annual surveys at the airport last year.
“We hadn’t surveyed in a few years and it was really important to pick the baton back up to see how this population was doing,” he said. As a federal facility, they are also required to have an Environmental Management System, which includes monitoring populations of threatened and endangered species on the property. “Having this kind of information ahead of time also saves a lot of time and money when planning a construction project because we know what type of restraints we have and don’t have,” Denisi said.
But he sees other opportunities as well. “When you can simultaneously satisfy your organization’s mission, reduce costs, and provide an opportunity for a threatened or endangered species to exist, that’s huge in terms of societal benefit,” Denisi said. “In a time when many natural systems are in serious decline, we really need to think outside the box.”
Sometimes “outside the box” means inside the secured perimeter fence.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will be working with partners like the FAA again this spring to implement systematic surveys of potential frosted elfin habitat. Learn more
