Butterflies and wildflowers are beginning to appear in the park.

The Pipevine Swallowtails are very large, black butterflies with iridescent blue spots on the lower parts of their wings. If you are lucky, you may also see the Pipevine Swallowtail’s very large black caterpillars, with their distinctive red spikes.

Look too for Mourning Cloaks, another large butterfly. These beautiful dark brown butterflies have an edging of white or cream color on their raggedy edged wings.

Sara’s Orange Tips are smaller, white butterflies with orange on the very top tips of their wings — I always think they look very cheerful. If you know what a Cabbage Butterfly looks like, you will be able to spot the Orange Tips.

You can see all of these butterflies down at Ruck-A-Chucky campgrounds right now on Driver’s Flat Road.

So get out those nets and cameras, but remember, catch and release only. Keep good field notes so we know which butterflies are doing well in ASRA. Be gentle, and these beautiful and delicate messengers of spring will be around for your children to enjoy.

If you want to learn more about California butterflies, check out Professor Al Shapiro’s butterfly website at http://butterfly.ucdavis.edu

Professor Shapiro started keeping records of butterfly populations when he was a teenager, and he still does this to track when different butterflies hatch and if the populations are changing locations.

Spring is a good time for playing with rocks at the park. Unlike during the summer, the rocks are cool and the weather is just right for creating art, or just looking at these stones, which are some of the oldest things in the park. Last Sunday, I noticed this mysterious rock sculpture at Mammoth Bar near the 90 cc. motorcycle track. I took a photo of it, because wind, weather, and animals will probably return these rocks to their original state on the river bank. I thought the small rocks between the large ones were cool.

Another name for piles of rocks like this one is a “cairn.” In Scotland, before warriors would go into battle, they would toss a stone onto the cairn. When the warriors returned from battle, they would take a stone off. The stones that remained showed how many warriors the tribe had lost. Today, cairns are used to mark things in nature, like trails, or good places for gold mining. I wonder what this one is marking?