The Dakota Skipper needs to have Echinacea, a purple coneflower,
and there's a lot of purple coneflower here at Glacial Lakes.
But about 20 years ago, 15 years ago,
the Skippers disappeared through most of Minnesota.
And there's not a lot known about why that happened.
These butterflies have disappeared from most of their range, gone
from at least three fourths of what we know.
And they're really good indicators of problems on the prairie themselves.
Minnesota Zoo has been interested for several years
in rearing Dakota Skippers and trying to get them ready
to repopulate some of the places they used to be common.
Really, in the beginning it was just an experimental process to see if we could,
even if there was even a role for rearing
and breeding of this imperiled butterfly.
Our strategy here at the Minnesota Zoo is to get them
through their really sensitive larval stages,
keep them protected from predators, diseases and all those other threats
that they would be facing out in the Minnesota prairies
until they reached their adult stage have never been tried
before in any real scope.
As we now have grown, we are at the stage where we will.
We are doing reintroductions, trying to reestablish lost
populations of Dakota Skippers into the wild.
We've chosen three initial release stations that were putting
the butterflies out.
And of course the end goal is that the whole 2000 acres
of continual grassland is occupied by the Dakota Skippers.
Without the habitat
we don't have any chance of of bringing the Dakota Skipper back.
And our part of the partnership was to make sure our habitat
was as good as we could make it in the time that we had.
So the fact that it's so large,
that was one of the big reasons why we chose it, but also the fact that it has
this amazing native plant community that is still here.
We can learn what it takes to make good prairie and bring these species back.
It's going to be helping us bring lots of other things back as well.