August 3, 2018 • Seaside Signal • seasidesignal.com • 7A
Silverspot butterfly makes
return to Saddle Mountain
Silverspot
caterpillars are
back
By Katie Frankowicz
The Daily Astorian
BRENNA VISSER/THE DAILY ASTORIAN
Karen Emmerling and Alexis Butler haved worked togeth-
er for more than 11 years.
For Alexa Butler, a
summer job turns
into a life passion
Butler has
worked at
Beach Books
in Seaside for
more than 11
years
By Brenna Visser
Seaside Signal
Like many 15-year-olds,
Alexa Butler was in search
of a summer job.
That summer, she was
drawn by the “help wanted”
sign in the window at Beach
Books in Seaside. She had
always loved reading.
“I can get paid to talk
to people about books that
I love? What’s better than
that?” Butler said.
What the 15-year-old
Butler didn’t anticipate was
that 11 years later the book
store would become both
her career and her home.
Anyone who has perused
Beach Books in the past
decade most likely has met
Butler, greeting customers
with a smile behind the front
desk or shelving books at the
store wedged at the corner of
Holladay Drive and Broad-
way. She loves helping cus-
tomers who wander into the
store as a refuge, attempting
to escape the chaos of the
beach.
Tags with handwritten
recommendations from But-
ler and other staff members
hang from books on the
shelf.
“There’s so much out
there. I like young adult,
fantasy,” Butler said. “But
probably not sad, ‘The Note-
book’-type books.”
When she’s not at the
store, Butler likes to travel
and, well, read more books.
But what has kept the
Seaside native at Beach
Books for the long haul is
not just her love of litera-
ture, but also for the woman
who hired her.
Karen Emmerling, the
owner of Beach Books, re-
members having an instant
connection with Butler, to
the point where she trusted
Butler to run the store alone
on her first day.
“Her math teacher, who
is a good friend of mine, rec-
ommended her,” Emmerling
said. “And said that maybe
she wasn’t all that good at
math, but she was very re-
sponsible. I just trusted she
was going to do it right.”
Over the years, the rela-
tionship slowly progressed
from co-workers to friends,
and then friends into family.
The two joked about
keeping sleeping bags up-
stairs for long days worked
during the summer rush.
Their conversations behind
the counter are laced with
laughs and inside jokes.
One of Butler’s favor-
ite memories was throwing
Emmerling a surprise birth-
day party in the store.
“I had no idea that when
I was in high school that
I would be treated like a
daughter,” Butler said.
Since then, Emmerling
has entrusted her with more
responsibilities. For the past
few years, she has sent But-
ler to regional and national
bookseller’s
conventions
and conferences to hone her
skills and network with au-
thors.
One day, she could see
passing the baton to Butler.
“She knows books so
well, and if she’s passion-
ate about a book, you aren’t
leaving without it,” Emmer-
ling laughed. “She’s engag-
ing and she’s going to make
a great bookseller.”
Rare butterfly caterpillars
are back on the slopes of Sad-
dle Mountain for the first time
since they completely disap-
peared from the area years
before.
Government and private
partners released 500 Oregon
silverspot caterpillars on the
mountain’s rocky meadow
slopes recently as part of an
ongoing effort to rebuild the
threatened butterfly’s popula-
tion at key sites.
“It was a culmination of so
much work and it was almost
a celebration,” said Trevor
Taylor, manager for the rein-
troduction project at the Or-
egon Parks and Recreation
Department.
Last year, teams rein-
troduced caterpillars at the
Nestucca Bay National Wild-
life Refuge in southern Tilla-
mook County with plans to
release caterpillars at Saddle
Mountain this year — a site
Taylor describes as “prime
real estate” for the red-orange
butterflies marked with dis-
tinctive silver spots.
Elsewhere, the small but-
terfly’s decline has been
linked to a decline in habitat
but its disappearance from
Saddle Mountain is more
mysterious. There are several
theories for the decline: past
chemical spraying practices
on surrounding timberland
may have impacted the butter-
flies, or perhaps the butterflies
were unable to weather espe-
cially rough winters. People
who searched for silverspots
on the mountain in the 1970s
saw them; when people went
looking again in the early
2000s, they were gone.
“We don’t know when the
silverspots disappeared, we
don’t know why they disap-
peared,” said Mike Patterson,
a contractor for the U.S. Fish
and Wildlife Service on the
reintroduction project. “We
can only speculate about why
they disappeared and that’s
speculation — there’s no way
to prove it.”
Saddle Mountain remains
one of the few sites where
the Oregon silverspot’s main
source of food — another rare
organism, the early blue violet
— blooms in abundance. Oth-
er wildflowers also flourish
there. The variety of blooms
make the mountain a popular
destination for hikers. For the
butterflies, these flowers will
provide additional sources of
nectar, Taylor said.
Over the summer, many of
the silverspots will die. Some
will be eaten before they pu-
pate, others will be eaten
while they pupate or when
they emerge as butterflies.
PHOTOS BY COLIN MURPHEY/THE DAILY ASTORIAN
Kim McEuen holds up an Oregon silverspot butterfly in the lab at the Oregon Zoo. The conser-
vation lab raised caterpillars that were released at Saddle Mountain.
Oregon silverspot caterpillars seen
through the viewfinder of a microscope.
At the Nestucca site, Pat-
terson could account for only
9 percent of the nearly 1,000
caterpillars released along his
survey route. It was a num-
ber that concerned others in-
volved, but not Patterson.
“Being able to account for
only 9 percent doesn’t mean
only 9 percent became butter-
flies,” he said.
And he feels confident
about the caterpillars’ success
on Saddle Mountain.
“My guess is we’ll see but-
terflies,” he said. “The habitat
is certainly ripe for them up
there.”
Of the 500 caterpillars now
chomping away at plants on
Saddle Mountain, 280 larvae
came from the Oregon Zoo’s
butterfly conservation pro-
gram, which raises as many
as 10,000 Oregon silverspot
and Taylor’s checkerspots in
its lab at any given time to
supplement wild populations.
Larvae also come from labs at
Seattle’s Woodland Park Zoo,
the children of wild female
silverspots collected from
Mount Hebo in the Siuslaw
National Forest in Tillamook
County.
Kim McEuen works with Oregon silverspot caterpil-
lars at the Oregon Zoo. The conservation lab raised
caterpillars that were released at Saddle Mountain.
“Numbers are dictated
year to year by (the Fish and
Wildlife Service) but it is
highly likely we will continue
to operate at or near capacity
over the next several seasons
at least,” said Travis Koons,
who oversees the Oregon
Zoo’s butterfly conservation
program. “We will continue
to release high numbers of
larvae at the various sites.”
The silverspot caterpil-
lars were placed on early
blue violets in three different
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New firm takes over local land surveying
By Edward Stratton
The Daily Astorian
Dale Barrett, a land survey-
or who joined HLB & Asso-
ciates in 1986, has amassed a
treasure trove of maps, plans
and institutional knowledge
from countless North Coast
projects dating back to the
1970s.
As he approaches retire-
ment, Barrett is helping tran-
sition HLB’s operations to
S&F Land Services, a Port-
land-based firm that has taken
on his team of coastal survey-
ors.
HLB was originally found-
ed in Manzanita by Colin
Handforth and Ron Larson in
1975 as Handforth and Larson
Surveying and Engineering.
Barrett, previously a coun-
ty surveyor, joined the two in
1986, creating HLB & Asso-
ciates. In 2006, the company
merged with Portland-based
design, planning and engineer-
ing firm Otak Inc. to form HLB
Otak.
Otak recently gave HLB no-
tice that it would be pulling out
of the partnership, Barrett said.
EDWARD STRATTON/THE DAILY ASTORIAN
Dale Barrett, left, is helping Chris Sherby, co-owner of S&F
Land Services, take over his landsurveying on the North Coast.
“They were just not that in-
terested in the coastal market,”
he said. “They want big-city
stuff. Their primary focus is
Denver, Portland, Seattle.”
Otak reached out to S&F,
an emerging small business
formed in 2016 by Christo-
pher Sherby and Matthew
Faulkner, a former employee
of HLB, about taking over the
surveying team. This month,
S&F took over all of HLB’s
accounts.
The company’s survey
projects range in size from
small residential property
line disputes and municipal
contracts to large commercial
projects and the reconstruc-
tion of the system of jetties
at the mouth of the Columbia
River. S&F is able to pro-
vide cost-effective surveying
locally because of the copi-
ous records and institution-
al knowledge from HLB’s
43-year history, Sherby said.
Former employees of HLB
have also taken up many po-
sitions with local municipal-
ities.
“Dale’s been taking me
around to introduce me to all
the agencies, and everywhere
we go, it’s usually some-
one who’s worked for Dale,”
Sherby said.
HLB had more than 50 em-
ployees and offices in Manza-
nita, Gearhart and Long Beach,
Washington, when the merger
with Otak occurred in 2006.
But during the Great Reces-
sion, Otak cut the staff down
to fewer than 10 and closed
the offices in Long Beach and
Manzanita, Barrett said.
“All the work is still here,”
he said. “The possibility of
growth is really good. The
struggle is to find the staff.”
With a staff of around sev-
en, the company has been in-
undated with work so far and
is looking to add more survey-
ors on the coast, Sherby said.
Like others, it faces a lack of
affordable housing that makes
it difficult to bring in new peo-
ple. But for those who join,
Sherby said, S&F provides a
high-quality, family wage po-
sition.
“We’re trying to provide a
full, lifetime career,” he said.
areas on Saddle Mountain.
Over the next few weeks
and throughout the summer,
Patterson and others will
check different survey points,
counting any adults they see.
Though Patterson is confident
this first reintroduction will
find some degree of success,
he said, “At the same, it’s not
a one-time quick fix kind of
deal. This is just the first of
probably quite a few efforts
to go up there and release
more caterpillars.”
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