Join us for a fascinating spring lecture on Mojave and Colorado Desert pollinators by Dr. Gordon Pratt, co-author of the newly published ‘The Butterflies and Skippers of Joshua Tree National Park’. Dr. Pratt will discuss the butterflies you may encounter on a visit to the park, provide participants with an in-depth account of these insects within their desert habitats, and offer guidance on how to make butterfly habitat using native plants and other things.

Copies of this beautiful new field guide will be available for purchase and the authors will be available for book signing. This unique book discusses 98 species found in and around Joshua Tree National Park. For each species, there is life cycle and food plant information beyond what is typically found in butterfly guides. The book is illustrated with over 600 photos.

Guests can register for the talk in advance or buy a ticket at the door: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/lecture-and-walk-butterflies-and-skippers-of-joshua-tree-national-park-tickets-519947706587

This lecture is in honor of Audrey W. Rottman.

Madena Asbell, Director of Plant Conservation Programs at the Mojave Desert Land Trust, will lead first-come, first-served guided tours of MDLT’s Mojave Desert Discovery Garden at before and after the lecture. Sign up on arrival for a tour.

Dr. Gordon Pratt did his undergraduate in Biology at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts and his Masters in Molecular Biology isolating mRNA from female blowflies at Queen’s University in Kingston Ontario, Canada. He later did his Ph.D. on the systematics of the dotted blues (Euphilotes) at the University of California at Riverside. These butterflies potentially evolved in sympatry through food plant shifts on to buckwheat species with different bloom times. From there he went to the University of Delaware to do a postdoc on sympatric speciation through host plant shifts in Enchenopa binotata (treehoppers). In the mid-1990s Dr. Pratt returned to the University of California at Riverside and continued his research on butterflies and their food plants. During his time at the University of California Pratt taught an extension course on butterfly ecology, studied insect and plant diversities on military installations, and endangered butterflies of southern California. In 2013 Pratt retired from the University of California but still works on butterflies and their food plants of southern California.