Massachusetts Butterfly Club
2021 Fall Meeting
Can You ID This Butterfly?
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The meeting began with a short tribute to Bill Callhan who passed away August 23rd. Bill was an avid member and former VP of the club. We miss him dearly.
A brief business meeting was held. Danielle Desmarais gave a report on the Hessel’s Hairstreak project. She was also the recipient of our first annual Butterfly Conservation Award. She was presented a tote bag, created by Nan Wilson, with a picture of the Hessel’s Hairstreak and the MBC logo. That was followed by brief reports on the 30 for 30 initiative, the Butterfly Institute presented by MBC and Tower Hill Botanical Gardens, and the Barbara Walker Festival which was held in the real (non Zoom) world and was very successful.
Our guest speaker was James Michielini.
James Michielini is a graduate student in Dr. Elizabeth Crone's Lab in the Department of Biology at Tufts University. He graduated from Tufts in 2019 and completed an undergraduate thesis studying the relationship between phenology and relative abundance in Massachusetts Butterflies. He continued working on his thesis work at Tufts where he began as a graduate student last year. He currently studies the potential effects of climate change on the range distribution and population dynamics of the Pipevine Swallowtail Battus philenor.
You can see his presentation at this link Changing With The Climate: How Butterflies Respond To The Warming World
We followed that with a celebration of butterfly PHOTOS taken by club members and a short social “hour” (15 minutes).
A wonderful evening! We missed the food but all had a short drive home.
Thanks again to technical experts Dave Small and Rosemary Mosco for making the meeting run so smoothly.