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Just about half a century after the last person to live in Surfridge departed the neighborhood, it seems abandoned to human eyes — especially from the vantage point of an airplane, which is how most of us experience it now. But if we had a chance to look closer, we would find that it has a vast number of residents, including butterflies, burrowing owls, legless lizards, scorpions, and California gnatcatchers.
They all have found a home within the fenced-off perimeter of the old neighborhood, and they are joined by a wild catalog of native plants and grasses: beach evening primrose, seacliff buckwheat, California croton, deerweed, jimson weed, sand verbena, silver burr ragweed, branching phacelia, lupine, California poppies and more.
With no humans about other than the occasional volunteer group clearing out invasive species (like ice plant, the South African succulent shrub imported to California in the early 1900s to prevent erosion that has since become all but ubiquitous in coastal California), they all have a chance to thrive despite a visit every 90 seconds or so by the deafening overhead roar of a passenger jet departing Los Angeles International Airport. It makes for an unlikely nature preserve, and yet it somehow has worked for half a century. And it is all due to perhaps its most delicate resident, the El Segundo blue butterfly.
Relatively small as butterflies go — less than an inch across — the El Segundo blue butterfly actually sports a riot of colors including blue, brown, orange, black, and gray. It requires a very specific habitat (coastal dunes and seacliff buckwheat plants, the latter its only host plant) to feed and reproduce. By the time they emerge from their pupal stage during the summer, the delicate insects live for only a few days to two weeks.
The El Segundo blue butterfly consumes the nectar of seacliff buckwheat and uses the same plant to deposit its eggs.
The El Segundo blue butterfly — scientific name Euphilotes battoides allyni — occupies a limited range along the coast of the South Bay of the Los Angeles region. A population of 750,000 decreased rapidly during the almost complete decimation of its habitat during the quick development of the Southern California shoreline in the 20th century; in 1976, it was estimated that fewer than 500 existed in the Surfridge dunes. It was declared an endangered species by the federal government in 1976.
Read: Saving the Blue Butterfly
The decision came just in time: With Surfridge almost entirely cleared of homes by 1975, LAX had to decide what to do with the 200 vacant acres. Each time a new plan was proposed — a golf course, a viewing platform for watching planes, a further expansion of the airport’s runways — the California Coastal Commission was able to block the change because of what it would do to what is now known as the El Segundo Blue Butterfly Habitat Preserve.
Though the butterfly remains endangered still today, biologists and conservationists believe the population in the dunes of Surfridge has stabilized and may even be growing. In 2013, new colonies were discovered as far north as the Ballona Wetlands, though the El Segundo Blue Butterfly Habitat Preserve remains their primary home.
