Unlike the many summer butterflies who proliferate on our warm-season blooms, the mourning cloak isn’t much of a flower fancier, instead taking her sustenance from sap upon emerging in early spring. She doesn’t linger for her glam shots either, sensing our apparently formidable presence and absconding before we even open the front door.

A tough cookie, she’s one of the longest-living butterflies, surviving the winter in tree crevices, leaf litter, and cracks in structures with the help of internal antifreeze substances. Yet she’s afraid of my shadow, often taking off into the trees when I’ve hardly yet realized she’s there. A nervous Nelly, she doesn’t float so much as flit—a common behavior among spring butterflies inhabiting the canopies.

Last year I spent a week of early afternoons in hot pursuit of my elusive friends, sitting in several locations around their favorite elm tree and waiting with what I thought was infinite patience. It wasn’t until my knee became a surprise runway for a butterfly landing—and I caught only the tail end because I was engrossed in my iPhone—that I realized how unready my spirit was for the privilege of close encounters with this shy species. (I described the experience in a post called Emergence.)

Forced to sit still, listen, watch, read and think for long stretches this past winter while writing a book, I have undergone my own metamorphosis since the last time these beautiful creatures awakened. This season, it hasn’t taken long to learn how to revise my approach—both physical and mental—to studying them. More than anything else, it helps if you put down your tool of distraction long enough to examine their flight patterns and basking behaviors. Moving deliberately is also key. In Butterflies through Binoculars, Jeffrey Glassberg provides tips that seem to be written directly to my clumsy old self: “Unfortunately, butterflies are pretty good motion detectors. So, you need to slow down. And be more graceful. The more slowly and gracefully you move, the less likely you will frighten the butterfly.”

The last thing I want to do is frighten any creature, so this year’s sightings of mourning cloaks and other butterflies in the brushfoot family have had me tiptoeing around the front yard as if I have tiny brushfeet of my own. When a mourning cloak landed directly in the path through our front garden as I headed to the post office last week, I postponed my outing, retrieved my camera, sat on the stoop, and waited. It didn’t take long before the return appearance, and over the next half-hour I moved my legs and arms ever so slightly to get closer to the little beauty. In the process of watching the butterflies over the next few days, I saw them blow over in high winds and then right themselves again once the gusts had passed. I noticed their wings becoming more tattered. I discovered other insects that I’d never have come across—including a beautiful painted hickory borer—without the spring butterflies as my guides.

It was an Eastern comma butterfly’s repeated refills from the tap of elm tree sap that led my camera lens to that hickory borer cruising up the bark nearby. But the comma herself kept a wide berth, darting away as I tried to capture an image but then flying teasingly over my head after I gave up and decided to refill the birdbaths and weed the elderberry patch instead. One afternoon I parked in my chair and took photos from a 30-foot distance, lamenting that the Eastern comma still did not think me evolved enough to join her inner circle.

But no matter; it must mean I’m not ready yet. I will keep trying, stopping and waiting to see what these butterflies have to teach me. If I’m lucky enough, I may even feel a little tickle on my knee again one day. I just hope I’m still ditching my phone long enough to enjoy the experience.

[Photos by Nancy Lawson]