Blue hour over the dunes. Six of them out, one resting — plus everyone's. Everything that
moves here is a keyframe; if your system prefers reduced motion, the evening holds still.
0 released into the shared meadow since July 18tap the dunes — your release joins everyone's
The El Segundo Blue is a butterfly the size of a thumbnail that lives nowhere on Earth
except a couple of miles of dune between this town and the runways. In 1976 it became one
of the first insects ever listed under the Endangered Species Act. It never left; the town
grew around it.
An adult flies for about four days. It spends nearly all of them on one plant — seacliff
buckwheat — which is nectar, meeting place, and nursery at once. Eggs go into the flower
heads; the next year comes out of them. The dunes keep the species. The airport, of all
neighbors, keeps the dunes.
A garden is slow on purpose. So is a recovery: from a few hundred counted in the worst
years to tens of thousands now, one buckwheat at a time. This room is in season every
summer, and the butterflies stay all year.
Field notes
Name Euphilotes battoides allyni · the El Segundo Blue
Listed June 1, 1976 — among the first insects on the federal endangered list
Range the El Segundo dunes, beside the LAX runways — and nowhere else
Host seacliff buckwheat (Eriogonum parvifolium) — the whole life happens on it
Flight mid-June through August, about four days per butterfly
Status recovering — restoration of the dunes brought the counts back by orders of magnitude
