Taking Flight

By HARRIET HOWARD HEITHAUS, hkheithaus@naplesnews.com

Saturday, January 8, 2005
It could have been a natural progression from landscaping, planting Florida's flowers that lure butterflies to lay their eggs and slurp their nectar. It could have been seeing the swallowtail squadrons that breezed through the yards he tended on their way to winter breeding grounds.

Mike Malloy, however, credits the unlikeliest of causes: an old sports injury. The subsequent knee replacement surgery forced him to sit at home for several months, and gave Malloy the chance to follow up on an art project simmering in his mind for decades. He thought he would like to produce some butterfly boxes, those Plexiglas cases with artistically mounted specimens.

"Thirty years ago, I saw them in Puerto Rico. I was so taken by them I kept telling (my wife) Jackie that someday I'm going to do that," says Malloy.

"Someday" arrived with a vengeance.

"I had lots of time, and because I'm in the landscaping business I was going crazy," he recalls. "I was at my computer and I started reading everything I could on butterflies. I was reading for weeks."

From that educational frenzy, the Malloys and their two animated Dalmatians have seen their yard, their garage, and the walls of their Queens Park home turned over to butterflies.

Butterfly pupae gobble down greens Malloy slides into boxes where they hatch in his garage. The couple's screened lanai is a botanical garden where home-grown from which butterflies are released. Nearly every square inch of what was lawn is now blooming with plants those creatures, and the wild ones drawn into it, use for sustenance and as larval repositories.

"I can walk out into the back yard and see scores of them flying around. They stay close, too. We have a running joke with the neighbors who tell us, 'Some of your relatives were over visiting yesterday.'"

Malloy has made hundreds of Plexiglas worlds in which all kinds of lepidoptera — butterflies; their lesser known cousins, skippers; and moths — float forever in patterns that soar up a wall. Other boxes hold butterflies that "fly" in letter formations or in the shape of a heart, a Christmas tree, an initial.

Malloy is still a professional landscaper. In fact, he likes to plant butterfly gardens. But he — like many Neapolitans — is blooming in a second career, this one as an artist. He and Jackie drive a van with their Web site, www.naplesbutterfly.com, on the rear window. The license plate? BFLYS.

"I could never had done this up North," the New Jersey native says earnestly, standing in a back yard that looks like a living crayon box. It's stuffed with orange-tipped milkweed, Popsicle-red pentas, a slew of porterweed, lemon-bloomed cassia and passionflower vines, among other flora that attract butterflies. A deck over the yard serves as an observation point, where Malloy watches the butterflies in flight, getting flight pattern inspirations for his boxes from them.

A tag team of five or six white ones chase each other around him as he talks. Malloy has become such a lepidoptera student he could likely name all 160 varieties that live in Florida, nearly half the known varieties in North America. ( "California and Arizona have more varieties," he confides.) He has even considered, at age 56, returning to school to study them formally.

Although he's now a student in the Collier County University Extension Master Gardener program, Malloy's yard has already been a tour stop for that group.

"They were going through the yard, saying, 'Can I have some seeds for this? Can I take a cutting of this?" he says, laughing. He loves it; the plant swaps with fellow butterfly lovers have put vines from Hawaii and bushes from the East Coast in his yard — "a real side benefit of being a butterfly lover."

A member of The Lepidopterists' Society, Malloy also serves as a tagger for the University of Kansas Monarch Watch, which tags the familiar orange-and-black butterflies to study where they're stopping and how far they travel per day in their annual migration to Mexico. Malloy can fit a tiny label on the underside of the lower wing of a live monarch and send it on its way with microscopically small information about time of day, weather, date and other identification.

"It has absolutely no effect on their flying," he said. "I've seen butterflies flying with three wings.

The end point of all Malloy's education has been the painstaking process of putting the creatures posthumously in pieces of art. When your "paint" costs up to $50 for a major brushstroke and can be rendered worthless with one slip of the finger, patience takes on financial value.

"It took me three weeks to work up the courage to put this one on," he says, pointing to a Madagascar dragon moth with colossal 14-inch tails on its lower wings. The fragile extensions he had to work around taper down to less than an eighth of an inch in width, widening into pill-size flaps bearing eyes to frighten off predators.

Some butterflies are expensive solely because of their color, such as the small red butterflies Malloy has made into winged hearts.

When Malloy assembles a box, the theme is sketched out first, then the background — generally clear — colors and the colors of the butterflies determined. Of the nearly 10,000 species of butterflies, skippers and moths, there is a good percentage of 3,000 butterfly species are available. The color spectrum is striking from deeps to brights in oranges and yellows through iridescent blues and greens, whites and even a deep violet.

Moths can be striking too, because some of them take on a deep blue hue to fool predators at dusk. Some, like the day flier, the sunset moth, wear a two-sided palette of black, gold, blue and white.

"They're really hard to work with because the color on their wings is ruined so easily. It's just like dust — it comes off on your fingers," Malloy explains. The small butterflies, such as the fingernail sized sulfas that add personality to an arrangement, are tough for large athletic hands to work with, too, he adds.

All of the butterflies have been dried, and the serious work can't begin after an overnight treatment in a chemical that slowly rehydrates them and makes their wings pliable. After that, it's time to work quickly before the second dehydration. Malloy says his pieces have changed enroute to completion, and that some of them can occupy weeks or months while he's working on other pieces.

"Sometimes it all takes shape as I'm doing it," he said.

The direction of the winged display is his choice: Sometimes he wants the entire wingspan horizontal, other times it's pushed gently into the v-shape of a butterfly at rest. But the types of butterflies that are in one box need to be in a similar family: A rounded angel wing won't work well with the narrow-pointed swallowtails. In his artistic vision, which he puts simply: "They look too jumbled up."

Jackie Malloy says she's not a good assistant: "I couldn't be steady enough at all to work with them. I stay out of his way when he's working, because he's really intent on it."

Her interest is interior decor, and the walls of the Malloys' home, done in salt-water-taffy shades, make high-contrast backdrops for huge wall pieces that incorporate as many as 50 butterflies. They don't stay there long.

"We had one customer come in and buy a $15,000 piece straight off the wall," her husband recalls. He hasn't exhibited at many shows, he says, because of the demand for custom pieces. His largest? A 4-by-4 foot piece with nearly 200 butterflies arcing around in seeming flight over the wall.

In the meantime, Malloy's small lepidopterarium demands daily feeding of the pupae that have hatched from larvae and stocking of the pupae that are laid on host plants throughout his yard. The small sacs don't announce themselves.

"Some of them are really small. If you don't know what you're looking for, you'll never spot it. See that? That's one," he says, guiding the untrained eye to an egg the size of a nonpareil that has been tucked onto the underside of a leaf.

Malloy's own broods are set free to populate the world. And he is adamant about following practices that don't kill the creatures or deal in bounty-hunted butterflies. His purchases, he says, come from government-controlled commercial groups in Papua New Guinea, or South American butterfly farms. The latter have sprung up as an alternative to bounty hunting. Because their butterflies flourish under forest canopies, these farms generally are seen as a dual solution to provide South American people a living preserve rain forests, and up to 60 percent of them are turned loose.

He hesitates to the butterfly releases that have become popular for weddings or funerals. It's largely because of the fear that weather won't be friendly, not that butterflies and their natural cousins won't find a place to deposit their pupae.

But he made an exception. When his mother, who lived with him and Jackie during her final years with Alzheimer's Disease, died three years ago, her son sent a spray of monarchs winging out from her burial place.

"One hundred and fifty of them," he says.

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