"Semidea persistently haunts the great gray rock-pile which is the summit cone"
Most interesting of all to the lepidopterist is the one Arctic butterfly of our New England fauna, Oeneis semidea, "The White Mountain Butterfly," which might be perhaps better called in common parlance "The Mount Washington Butterfly," as it is commonly believed to be restricted in its habitat, so far as New England is concerned, to the high summit cone of Mount Washington. Holland so states in his excellent butterfly book. As a matter of fact the insect is plentiful over a rather wider range. I found it along the Crawford trail out to the Lakes of the Clouds and Mount Monroe, as well as along the lawns and Alpine Garden and down the carriage road far below the summit cone. It is also found at similar altitudes on Jefferson, Adams and Madison, its habitat being rather the high peaks of the Presidential Range than Mount Washington alone.
But semidea persistently haunts the great gray rock pile which is the summit cone. Wherever you climb, there it flutters from underfoot like a two-inch fleck of gray-brown lichen that has suddenly become a spirit. Alighting, it turns into the lichen again. In rough weather the other butterflies go down hill into the shelter of the ravines, but this one has learned to fight gales and midsummer snow storms and hold patriotically to its native country. Even in still weather when disturbed it skims the surface of the rock in flight, seeming to half crawl, half fly, lest a gale catch it and whirl it beyond its beloved peak. Its refuge is the little caverns among and beneath the angled boulders, and when close pressed by a would-be captor it flies or climbs down into these as a chipmunk would, and remains there till the danger has passed. It seems to be born of the rocks and to flee to its mother as children do when afraid of anything. It is our hardiest mountaineer. Neither beast nor bird dares the winter on this high summit. Yet here, winter and summer, is the home of this boreal insect which in the egg or the chrysalid withstands cold that often goes to fifty below Fahrenheit, and is backed by gales that blow a hundred miles an hour. No wonder this little but mighty butterfly takes the colors of the rocks that are its refuge.
It is the only easily noticed form of animated wild life that one is sure to find on the very summit, even in summer. Hedgehogs sometimes come to the door of the Tip Top House in summer weather and have to be shooed away, and gray squirrels have been seen there; but these, like the tourists, are casual wanderers from the warmer regions below. I believe the only bird that makes its summer home on the cone is the junco, though I heard song-sparrows and white-throats sing down on the levels of the plateau, at the Alpine Garden and about the Lakes of the Clouds. The juncos breed about these next highest levels in considerable numbers, and one pair at least bred this summer high up on the summit cone, about a third of the way down from the top toward the Alpine Garden. Like the Arctic butterflies, the refuge of this pair was the interstices of the rocks themselves, the nest being actually a hole in the ground, beneath an overhanging jut of ledge where the moss from below crept perpendicularly up to it, but left a gap two inches wide into which the mother bird could squeeze. It was almost as much of a hole in the ground as that in which a bank swallow nests, absolutely concealed, and protected from wind or down-rush of torrential rain.
Rare butterflies are not the only insects which tempt the entomologist to the very summit of Mount Washington. On my butterfly day there I found two members of the Cambridge Entomological Society dancing eagerly about the trestle at the terminus of the Mount Washington Railway, collecting beetles, of which they had hundreds stowed away in their cyanide jars. I'll confess that all beetles look alike to me, but these grave and learned gentlemen were ready to dance with joy at their success of the afternoon before at the Lakes of the Clouds, where each had captured one Elaphrus olivaceus. The name sounds like something gigantic; as a matter of fact, olivaceus is a tiny, dark, oval-shaped beetle, on which these enthusiasts saw beautiful striæ and olive-yellow stripes. Having the eye of faith I saw them too, but only with that eye. Together we went hunting the Alpine Garden for Elaphrus lævigatus, another infinitesimal prodigy of great rarity and scientific interest, but the omens were bad and lævigatus escaped. Such are some of the magnets with which this mighty mountain top draws men and women from all over the world, to spend perhaps a day, perhaps a summer, among its clouds, its scintillant sunshine and its ozone-bearing breezes.
Storm winds drive most of us below. When they blow, all the beautiful lowland butterflies set their wings and volplane down to the shelter of the valleys behind the jutting crags and the head walls. The chill of descending night as well drives these light-winged creatures off the hurricane deck of this great rock ship of the high clouds. But the thousands of hardy Oeneis semidea simply fold their lichen gray wings and creep into miniature caverns of the jumbled granite, waiting, warm and secure, for the light of the next sunny day.
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MOUNTAIN PASTURES
Their Changing Beauty from Low Slopes to Presidential Plateaus
On the mountain farms the cultivated fields hold such levels as the farmer is able to find. Often on the roughest mountain side he has found them, treads on the stairways of the hills whose risers may be perpendicular cliffs or slide-threatening declivities. These last are for woodland in the farm scheme, if tremendously rough, or if they have roothold for grass and foothold for cattle they are pastures. Thus it is the pastures rather than the cultivated lands that aspire, and from their heights one looks down upon the farm-house and the farmer and his men at work in the hay fields. The stocky, square-headed, white-faced cattle may well feel themselves superior to these beings far below who groom and feed them, and from their wind-swept ridges I dare say they have the Emersonian thought, even if they have never learned the couplet: