The Oregon silverspot butterfly, sometimes shortened to OSB, is a relatively large, orange and black butterfly with silvery patches on the undersides of its wings.
It’s also threatened.
That’s why staff at the Lincoln Soil & Water Conservation District have been working to increase its habitat for five years, said Executive Director Tyler Clouse. But the work isn’t easy.
“During the larval stage, they only eat the early blue violet,” Clouse said. “And they can eat about 100 leaves, each larva. So they need a lot of blue violets and good density. Unfortunately, to keep that habitat and to keep those violets, you need a lot of management.”
He said Indigenous burning practices maintained the low meadows that support the early blue violet, but nearly all of those areas have disappeared.
The OSB was federally listed as threatened in 1980. The Oregon Zoo has worked for more than 25 years to release either pupa or caterpillars into the slivers of remaining habitat, including Rock Creek, south of Yachats. As of 2025, the zoo had delivered more than 35,000 silverspots to public land on the coast.
Clouse has a tattoo of the butterfly on his forearm, along with the plants associated with it. But he’s never seen a wild adult.
“Timing hasn’t always worked out for us to come out to these meadows during the flight time,” he told KLCC during a recent tour of coastal habitat on public and private land. “I’m hoping today we’re going to actually see one flying about.”
Katie Saaty is a Water Quality Monitoring Specialist with the Lincoln County Soil & Water Conservation District. She helped release larvae this May.
“We took cups of silverspot butterfly caterpillars that came out from the Oregon Zoo earlier that morning,” Saaty said. “They had them in these fancy little deli takeout container type of situations with a few early blue violet leaves in each one, to tide the caterpillars over.”
Saaty brought the caterpillars to a meadow near Big Creek Road, between Yachats and Florence, looked for early blue violets on site, and placed each one on its food plant.
Adult OSB’s have a different diet, and that’s primarily where landowners have been able to help. Patrick Mahaffey was one of the first people to be involved in the Coastal Pollinators Program. It’s been five years since Clouse’s group first replanted his property near Bob Creek, and he said patience is key.
“Building a house, you kind of design it, you build it, and there's your house, right?” Mahaffey said. “And in building a meadow, it's a living thing … you have to be committed to continually removing aggressive invasive plants and introducing and nurturing native plants.”
To work with property owners, Lincoln Soil & Water uses a Safe Harbor Agreement, recently renamed a Conservation Benefit Agreement, which ensures that landowners who help an endangered species can get financial and technical assistance and won’t incur new restrictions on their property. A similar program was used to help the black-footed ferret in Colorado and Kansas.
Mike Hoyt, a landowner farther south on Highway 101, said either party can easily end the contract on short notice.
“Our obligations are to maintain, do weed control on a yearly basis or twice a year basis, depending on what's going to be required,” said Hoyt. “And we said we'd be happy to do that, because we'd do that if we'd replanted the whole thing ourselves anyway.”
Clouse said his agency is set to begin the site preparation process at Hoyt’s property this fall, in anticipation of spring planting. But, he said, each small plant is expensive.
“The original cost of those was a buck fifty. Those have increased now to $2.50, which doesn't sound crazy,” he said, “but when you're buying … 17,000 plugs, I had put in my original grant budget for $1.50 and now I have to make up $17,000.”
Clouse said the agency gets funding from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s coastal program, a U.S. Forest Service program that sets aside forest thinning revenue for grants, and other sources.
All of this effort does more than help this one species of butterfly, Clouse said.
“They’re in the salt spray meadows or the wind-blown headlands like up at Mount Hebo. So they're really an indicator of how well that whole habitat is doing,” Clouse said. “If we're seeing the success of the OSB, we're gonna see the success of other species. We’re gonna see biodiversity.”
Over the years, the population of OSB, and suitable habitat, has grown. At the meadow near Big Creek, field scientist Katie Farmer searched for butterflies, tracking where the adults go, and when. Some silverspots already have numbered wings, and some don’t.
“Last year we marked 116. We’re at 24. Which is a little low this year,” Farmer said. “But we’ve got different drought conditions, the meadows look different, the plant communities look different this year.”
Later, in an open area near a power line, Farmer netted a female, and it was “naked,” or without a number. Clouse was able to see his first Oregon silverspot up close. Everyone surrounded Farmer on the ground, while she worked to tag it as number 25.
Delicately holding the butterfly, Farmer uncapped a Sharpie. “Yep, ultra-fine black Sharpie,” she said, and used it to mark both hind wings.
After getting its tattoos, the butterfly took off.
In the future, Clouse hopes that these butterflies could fly through a connected network of habitat on the Oregon Coast, which would benefit all species that depend on the coastal meadow ecosystem.
