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Sierra Club Bulletin. 



with the lofty summit butterflies. I would unlimber a little 

 butterfly net with jointed handle, and chase about over the 

 rough surface in an atmosphere about one-half as dense as that 

 of sea-level, until I would sink breathless and exhausted on the 

 soft flower-studded turf by the side of a great snow-bank, and 

 then content myself with watching my would-be victims take 

 their dainty sips of nectar and hunt eagerly for the right little 

 plant on which to lay their eggs. 



The most successfully elusive flutterers, in this life and death 

 game of hide and seek, were certain small velvety dark brown 

 butterflies which belong to a species, Erebia magdalena, limited 

 to Colorado's mountain tops. Whenever I flushed one it al- 

 ways made for the roughest patch of jagged rocks anywhere 

 near, and there it slowly fluttered invitingly over them until 

 after violent and painful scrambling I was ready to strike with 

 my net, when it would dive swiftly down to safety into the 

 dark openings among the uneven stones. I have seen speci- 

 mens go down into one of the pit-like refuges and then come 

 out ten or a dozen feet away from another opening connected 

 with the first by a dark sinuous way among the rocks. 



No Erebias have yet been found in the Sierra Nevada, but it 

 is highly probable, nevertheless, that one or more species occur 

 there. And some Sierra Club member should be first to find 

 them. They cannot be mistaken; small, velvety, dark brown 

 butterflies, expanding about one and a half inches. The species 

 found may have a single small eye-spot with yellowish ring for 

 a margin on either fore or hind wings or even on both. Two 

 or three species occur in Alaska and one in the Yellowstone. 

 They may occur anywhere above timber-line to the summits. 



A group of alpine butterflies which is represented in Cali- 

 fornia is the interesting genus Chionobas, (or Oeneis) of which 

 species occur on Mt. Katahdin in Maine, on the White Moun- 

 tains of New Hampshire, on the Rockies and on our own 

 Sierra Nevada. This curious and suggestive distribution of 

 these alpine butterflies, appearing as they do on mountain sum- 

 mits from the Atlantic to the Pacific, but wholly absent in the 

 great regions between these mountains, and the further extra- 

 ordinary fact that the Katahdin, White Mountain and Rocky 

 Mountain representatives of the genus all belong to the same 



