As you pause near Cragway Spring along the Mount Washington Auto Road on a sunny day, your gaze might land on a small moth-like insect drawing nectar from a goldenrod bloom. Higher up, you might spy a dull-colored butterfly nearly invisible against a rock in the sparse meadows of Bigelow's sedge. And you might keep walking, thinking both are inconsequential. But these tiny mountain butterflies are all about adaptation and sheer grit.

In the late 19th century, Samuel Hubbard Scudder, a Boston entomologist, became enamored of two butterflies found only in the White Mountains: The White Mountain Arctic (a.k.a. the White Mountain Butterfly), Oeneis norna semidea, and the White Mountain Fritillary, Argynnis montinus. These species are glacial relics, more abundant and widespread tens of thousands of years ago but now, with a warmer climate, thriving in their home well above treeline. Scudder spent many summer days chasing these hardy insects and scribbling his findings, including the fact that the caterpillars came out to eat only at night, cleverly outwitting daytime predators.

The butterflies fell off scientific radar until 2008, when the Waterman Fund awarded a one year grant to the Vermont Center for Ecostudies to monitor them. The organization's conservation biologist, Kent McFarland, found that Scudder's century-old findings, as published in his book The Life of a Butterfly, were all that existed on the two species. And McFarland knew that it would take a lot more than one year to compile new data.

Counting butterflies is challenging. First, there's the length of their "flight period," the adult part of their life cycle. After surviving the harsh winter as caterpillars, they emerge from their chrysalis or "eclose" in June and July and then fly around for their butterfly life span, only about seven or eight days. So if you got a "one-day snapshot," the data would be inaccurate, McFarland says. One week you might see hundreds of butterflies, the next week, none. You would need a team collecting data from many multiple days over several years to conclude anything significant.

The other problem, a major one in the Whites, is that these butterflies show themselves only on very sunny days. In summer 2008, there were only five of these. And just one of them was in June, during the butterflies' flight period.

With current population data in hand, scientists could get a better grasp of the concern that inspired the grant—whether climate change could affect these creatures that, as McFarland describes it, "live in this spaceship only 7 miles long." Because their range is that small, they are especially vulnerable to what might occur with climate change: habitat loss, changes in host plants, altered relationships with predators, or their own life cycle getting out of sync with the host plants' cycle.

However, a formal monitoring program is still a pipedream. The Waterman Fund was able to provide help for only the first year, and hopes another agency will support monitoring in the future. Without funding, we simply won't know if things have changed since the day in 1859 that Scudder wrote about the White Mountain Butterfly: "in a little more than an hour collecting, 59 were taken…this butterfly is exceedingly abundant."