David had been photographing endangered species in the Hawaiian rainforest and elsewhere for years, and his collections of photographs and Suzie's tarot cards seemed somehow related. Because species disappear when their habitat does, he photographed them against the nowhere of a black backdrop (which sometimes meant propping up a black velvet cloth in the most unlikely places and discouraging climates), and so each creature, each plant, stood as though for a formal portrait alone against the darkness. The photographs looked like cards too, card from the deck of the world in which each creature describes a history, a way of being in the world, a set of possibilities, a deck from which cards are being thrown away, one after another. Plants and animals are a language, even in our reduced, domesticated English, where children grow like weeds or come out smelling like roses, the market is made up of bulls and bears, politics of hawks and doves. Like cards, flora and fauna could be read again and again, not only alone but in combination, in the endlessly shifting combinations of a nature that tells its own stories and colors ours, a nature we are losing without even knowing the extent of that loss.
A climate's changes are tough to quantify. Butterflies can help. Entomologists prefer "junk species--" the kind of butterflies too common for most collections-- to keep up with what's going on in the insect's world. They're easy to find and observe. When do something unusual, something's changed in the area.Art Shapiro's team at UC Davis monitors ten local study sites, some since the 1970s. The ubiquitous species are the study's go-tos, helping distinguish between lasting changes (climate warming, habitat loss) and ones that will right themselves (one cold winter, droughts like last year's). Consistency is key; they collect details year after year, no empty data sets between.A few species have disappeared from parts of the study area altogether, probably a lasting change. On the other hand, seemingly big news in 2012 might be just a year's aberration. Two butterflies came back to the city of Davis last year, the umber skipper after 30 years, the woodland skipper after 20-- both likely a result of a dry winter with near-perfect breeding conditions of sunny afternoons and cool nights.