The Mount Charleston blue butterfly, a tiny insect about the size of a quarter, is found in a couple small patches high in southern Nevada’s Spring Mountains. These mountains are known as a sky island ecosystem because its relatively cool and wet climate provides homes to a much greater diversity of animals and plants than the arid lands that surround it.

“This mountain island in the middle of the desert [has] been isolated for the last 10,000 years,” says Corey Kallstrom, an endangered species expert for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. “Because of that isolation, unique species have developed in that area.”

The Mount Charleston blue butterfly is found nowhere else on earth. A large wildfire that’s burned through the region for most of this month came close to the main area where this tiny butterfly has been spotted in recent years, according to Kallstrom, and he’s worried about their fate.

http://www.npr.org/2013/07/23/204865648/nevada-wildfire-could-snuff-out-a-rare-butterfly

Posted by KWB wandering among the borderlands of the Ether.