Conservation and Ecological Repair: Butterfly Highways
04.06.2025 Miica Balint




An ocean flooded with topsoil and toxic agricultural run-off, ecological despair, and a number of animal-related occurrences have had me thinking of conservation recently. Possibly, truly, I have been thinking of conservation my whole life. Likely, astutely, I am only just learning how to write about it. 

I can distill these recent occurrences into three explorations of conservation in our region, so that is what I’ll do. A column of sorts. 


The spectacular rising swell for the week leading up to the tropical storm they named Alfred was  a marvel. My break had turned into a bloated, very active, pond, with waves perfectly forming to the left, to the right, out the back, and on the once-shoreline. The day before the storm set in, the ocean turned from a blue mirror of ceaseless lines, to a roaring, sweeping bowl. Winds were anywhere between sixty and one-hundred kilometers per hour, and I turned to walking along what sand was left. 

All kinds of things lay along the beach that day, alien to their resting place. Dampened down and covered in sand, Australia’s largest butterfly, native, once-common, and somehow still alive, lay among them. 

That trick you do when collecting pipis, hand delving deep into the sand to reveal whats closer to the surface, revived her from the muck. Sou and I were unsuspecting that she would flap her wings to signal the life she was holding onto. A Richmond Birdwing Butterfly, now classed as vulnerable to extinction, rare to see and rarer to grasp. We couldn’t quite believe it. Sou’s palm, considerably bigger than mine, contained her as we walked back towards where we had parked as our hands acted as a windbreak, protecting her from her own design. 

That afternoon we had ventured to the sea in Sou’s ute. Lucky I thought, as we dialled the aircon to warm and set it to high, to dry her out. Lucky, because this hopeful act wouldn’t be possible in my 1990 camry wagon. As I write this, my aircon can, once again, rid the windscreen fog that otherwise haunts my vision in the rain. Though, if you get stuck behind my pace, please know my speedometer has recently stopped working. And I don’t rush. 

Waterlogged and weighed down, I gently tried to stroke some of the clumps of sand off her massive birdlike wings. With the warmth she became increasingly active, traversing my arms, chest, lap, hair. Spreading fifteen centimeters, what she lacked in electric-blue colouration–the markings on the wings of males–she made up for in her massive wingspan. 

Once home it was dark, we were hungry, and unsure how to best help her. Her energy had waned with the sun, and we set her hanging vertical in the fig tree in my bathroom. Her weak feet clasped onto the long narrow leaves of the Sabre fig, and I left her in moonlight’s company. I wish I knew then what I came to find out the next day.  

The next day the rains came, and I was up before the birds to check on her. Feet unclasped from the tree, she lay crested on its leaves just a few centimeters from where I had positioned her the night before, her weight going unnoticed by gravity. She was very weak. I knew next to nothing about butterflies. 

 

Does she need light? Is she still waterlogged? Will she dry out? Is she cold? I set to making the honey water rescue remedy I was taught when my hands were a quarter of the size. Ingredients: warm water and honey, rescues: hopefully many creatures that might need rescuing. As the honey dissolved I read online that you can help sick butterflies to eat by using a little something to gently unfurl their proboscis into nectar. I knew that before trying to feed injured wildlife you should wait for advice, I also knew that it was not yet 6am and this butterfly was trusting me with her rescue. I tried and after a few gentle attempts, it seemed like she was drinking some of the remedy, though without my intervention, her proboscis was furling straight back to its naturality. The act felt forceful as much as it felt caring, and I started to look into who to speak with. 

At this point we still had power, though by that evening the winds ripping through our mountains would bring five days, six nights, of electricity respite. Conditions were already mounting to a point where driving was not a clever idea, and thus, the entirety of my day became dedicated to seeking guidance on how to rescue a weak, beautiful, and vulnerable butterfly in a storm, from home. 

Just weeks prior to the birdwing butterfly, a devastating incident with a wallaby had me investigating all the wildlife care options in our region. You can read about the wallaby, and my findings, in my second exploration of conservation. What I will say is this: I saw nothing of organisations that rescue injured insects. There are many things we can–and need to–do, to replenish the plummeting rates of extinction that insects are facing, most of which are preventative measures to mitigate insects getting to the point that this butterfly was now in. I will outline these at the bottom of the article. 

As a (soon to be trained) member of the Northern Rivers Wildlife Carers, I phoned them first. Alicia, receptive and kind, put out a call to their network. In the meantime she suggested I seek some advice from Coffs Harbour’s Butterfly House. I also spoke to Wires, Byron Bay Wildlife Hospital, and someone from the Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland, who said that he wasn’t sure if they were still in need of deceased Richmond Birdwing Butterflies for a conservation study, and he hoped that wouldn’t be the fate of my butterfly, but to keep it in mind. 

Each person on the other end of the line was courteous to my queries but ultimately unable to help much. Then, via Alicia’s call-out, I was put in touch with a woman named Robyn Lucienne. I rang, and the woman I reached on the other end of the line was in Kyogle, strapping down her bird aviaries in anticipation for five hundred mills of water that was supposedly coming the next day. I could hear her walking and pulling and puffing and she imparted abounds of knowledge to me. 

Robyn was an encyclopedia of the butterfly, bundjalam in Bunjalung. The bunjalam is the totem of the Bundjalung people, which signifies the abundance of butterflies once found in this region. I learnt that a butterfly's vibration is healing, that the powder on a butterfly's wing are minute feathers, that their wings are solar powered, and that solar panels were designed from their design. The awe. Butterflies taste from their feet, can hear in low hertz, and they map their surroundings by sound. The colours of the rainforest are musical notes to a butterfly, and they see iridescent colours that are beyond the range of what the human eye can comprehend. 

Robyn had a Richmond birdwing butterfly house, attached to the side of her house, with a  fountain, a pond, tree ferns, the birdwing butterfly vine, as well as the wonga wonga and zig zag vine, which the birdwing vine likes to grow near. She explained that it is very difficult to get a birdwing butterfly to maturity. 

“The caterpillar hatches and eats the egg and then starts eating from one of only two vines in the world. The caterpillar sheds its skin five times (instars), each time it may change colour and gets bigger. The last (fifth instar) can look black with fleshy spikes and yellow tips, brown with sparse brown spikes, or grey. The fifth instar is the size of half your little finger, and their brothers and sisters are cannibalistic (eat other larvae), so they crawl up to five metres away from the vine to form a chrysalis. It’s at this stage, when they are moving away from vine, that they are most likely to get stood upon, killed by human activity, ants, soldier beetles, pentatomid bugs, and assassin bugs. The caterpillar is fully grown in six weeks to pupa (chrysalis), then it makes a silk pad attached to a leaf, for twenty-eight days. At this stage they get eaten by pied currawong, noisy pitta, and wasps. Once a butterfly, they can live for six weeks, and can be eaten by flower spiders, orb weavers, wasps, noisy pittas, and other predatory birds.”

With habitat loss and fragmentation, Richmond Birdwing Butterfly populations are in ruins. Robyn’s butterfly aviary was to assist in the maturation process. “There’s nothing better than releasing them.” She now does the same with native birds. She told me that Citizen Science did a survey of her yard and found fifty-eight different species of native birds in her yard in one day. A true conservationist. 

Our conversation lasted a little over thirty minutes, and though my butterfly was fading, I had plenty to try. I enquired to come and see her home but she explained that she has had to pull everything down for the house to be raised. “I’ve had to transplant the tree ferns and other plants that were in the Butterfly house, I hope they survive, I've grown them from seeds. When the house is up I’ll look at replacing the aviaries.” Before disconnecting the line, she thanked me for listening. It was reciprocal. 

The birdwing on my floor. She prefers the pollen from white and red flowers, and will know what she is tasting through her feet. She needs sunlight, and without a UV lamp to mimic the sun, a regular lamp will do. Bark can act as a medicine for butterflies, and they tend to hang vertically on it when they need the medicinal properties. She was probably still waterlogged. 

I left her under the lamp, put on my oilskin trench, and stepped outdoors to find native flowers, bark, and foliage. Under the lamp she tried to fly, her wings still signalling the life she was holding onto. I placed the flowers into the rescue remedy, and dipped her feet into it, hoping the sense of nectar would signal her to drink. I had bark to offer, but she didn’t have the vitality to hold herself up. I sensed her energy shift. She was dying. By the evening our power was out, and the light in our butterfly was out too. I hoped that she was already reaching the natural end to her life. 

   

Later I messaged Robyn to inform her that the birdwing butterfly hadn’t made it, her response: 

“That’s sad.

I was a bit preoccupied with evacuation that evening. SES told me I had to drive to Lismore because the Kyogle Evacuation Centre was closed. So I wasn’t going to be here for days to keep the birds safe - tarps flapping, mosquitos and stress. 

I’ve had to make some hospital cages and isolate some and when I made the lectade or hydralite water, I [realised I] forgot to mention it to you. Whether it would have made a difference, or not. 

This morning I’ve got to catch Gouldians to move their aviary away from damp ground into the sun.”

Robyn emailed me information on how those who will read me can be a part of the solution for Australia's largest butterfly. 

  1. The Richmond birdwing vine isn't hard to grow, just let it grow through zig zag vine and wonga vines, or nearby a shrub, or up a tree. Plant one. They live for one hundred years. Our friends at the Burringbar Nursery have them, as well as an astounding selection of endemic natives.
  2. String ropes for the vine to grow up. The caterpillar will climb the vine munching all the soft new leaves. By the time it reaches the top the leaves below will regrow and the caterpillar will make its way back down.
  3. The vine is happy in semi-shade, and needs an occasional watering to thrive during drought. Keep ants and spiders away. Plant aromatic plants to make ant nests move. 
  4. Put a small fruit compost bin near the vine to attract the microscopic Forcipomyia midge that are the only insect that pollinates the Richmond Birdwing Vine flower.
  5. To keep female Richmond Birdwing butterflies around, and lay more eggs on your vines, plant water gums, scrub cherry, lilly pilly, native frangipani, brush box, pink euodia, red silky oak, grevilleas, black bean, blue quandong, bottlebrushes, and leptospermums Tea trees). Male butterflies can detect females up to five kilometres away, so they are likely to leave your garden.
  6. The Dutchman’s Pipe vine is an invasive weed that both attracts and poisons the Richmond Birdwing caterpillars as Butterflies mistake this weed for its caterpillar food and lay their eggs on them. Check for Richmond Birdwing Butterfly eggs before killing the Dutchman’s Pipe vine.
  7. Get involved in butterfly highway projects. It mitigates the fragmentation of their habitable land. A superhighway project for the Richmond Birdwing Butterfly has been in operation for year throughout Brisbane, and Robyn noted that “from the Sunshine Coast to Goonnellabah, schools have built butterfly highways.”

Intensive agriculture, agro-chemical pollutants (used in agriculture), climate change, extreme weather conditions, invasive species and urbanisation are all causes for insects being threatened with extinction. Worldwide, currently forty percent of insects are on the brink. Here’s some ways you can help:

  1. Stop vilifying insects. They are our friends, and we need them. Let yourself be in awe of them. 
  2. Trade your turf for a biodiverse native garden. Not only will you liberate yourself from the mower, you will be saving all of our lives in the long run. 
  3. Stop using pesticides and herbicides. Seriously. 
  4. Limit night time light use. The majority of nocturnal insects are attracted to artificial lights, and these lights are powerful sensory traps that can indirectly kill insects via exhaustion or result in predation before the sun rises. 
  5. Use natural soaps. Significant quantities of pollutants including ammonia, heavy metals, nitrogen, petroleum hydrocarbons, phosphorus, and surfactants drain directly into our local water systems. Natural waterways contain a diversity of aquatic insects, including some of the most threatened animals on Earth. 
  6. Support organic growers. By eating organic, biodynamic, and regeneratively farmed produce, by the nature of how they grow, you are supporting healthy soils and insect biodiversity.
  7. Plant natives. Even if they are in planter boxes, on sidewalks, in pots on a balcony, out the front of your work, or your favourite cafe. Have the agency to be a part of the solution.
  8. Advocate for regenerating colonized land. We need to be a part of a history that rewilds decrepit land. 











References: 
Francisco Sánchez-Bayo, Kris A.G. Wyckhuys, Worldwide decline of the entomofauna: A review of its drivers.
Biological Conservation, Volume 232, 2019. Pages 8-27. ISSN 0006-3207.

A.Y. Kawahara, L.E. Reeves, J.R. Barber, & S.H. Black, Eight simple actions that individuals can take to save insects from global declines, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 118 (2) e2002547117, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2002547117 (2021).

Threatened Species Factsheet: 
https://www.nespthreatenedspecies.edu.au/media/4jvj2fhn/2-1-butterflies-on-the-brink-findings-factsheet_v8.pdf

Biodiversity Factsheet: 
https://bie.ala.org.au/species/https://biodiversity.org.au/afd/taxa/bc002815-0006-41ba-90a6-cdf067c53535