Today we’d like to introduce you to Christopher Kline.
Hi Christopher, we’re thrilled to have a chance to learn your story today. So, before we get into specifics, maybe you can briefly walk us through how you got to where you are today.
My wife and I started Butterfly Ridge Butterfly Conservation Center on land that has been in my family for 160 years.
The idea for Butterfly Ridge came about as the result of feeling guilty that we were not doing anything with the five acres my father had given me. We would come visit my parents but would not go out and ‘play’ on the property. We thought at length of what we could do on five acres. We could sell the timber and make a bunch of money, but that did not sound very fulfilling. “What do we know how to do?” we asked ourselves. Well, we knew how to teach (we were both former classroom teachers), and we knew butterflies, so we decided to teach people about butterflies with our five acres.
Within a few months of making this decision, my father-in-law passed away, leaving my wife and her brothers a significant sum of money. Within a few months of his death, my mother passed away. Within a few weeks of my mom’s passing, my brother asked me to buy out his five-acre parcel, and thanks to my father-in-law’s passing, we had the money to do that. Simultaneously, my dad signed over his remaining eleven-acre parcel to me. Within six months of making the decision to use our property to teach others about butterflies, the project grow from five acres to twenty-one acres with as much cash as we needed to make it happen.
With the help of summer college interns, we have turned a historic farming property into a pollinator mecca, converting abused farmland into prairie, areas that were once mowed biannually into woodland openings, and a wetland that was crowded with exotic invasive plants into a fully functioning wet meadow. To make this happen, we have planted over 7000 plants, 95% of which grown from seed in our small greenhouse. Interns have helped us build trail, bridges, benches, a stage, and plant many of the plants.
This is a project in which the work is never totally finished. Every year, we ‘tinker around the edges,’ creating additional prairie or cutting another woodland opening. Often times nature helps by bringing down large trees in ice storms, creating a hole in the woods that will become our next woodland opening project.
And while we are specifically a butterfly place, we are friendly towards and study other pollinators as well. We offer moth lighting for the public on summer Saturday nights, where visitors can learn about the 900+ moth species that call the property home. We partner with other organizations that are studying bumble bees, hoverflies, and other pollinators.
The thing we are proudest of is our data collection. We religiously collect data on our butterfly and moth populations. Our data reveal that our habitat work has increased our butterfly population by 350 percent. What we are doing is working!
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
Has it been a smooth road? Absolutely not. The habitat work is hard, and it frequently takes 2-3 years before your see the results of your hard work.
While we have used inheritance as seed money for the project, at some point, Butterfly Ridge needs to become financially sustainable. This has been a point of contention. Many of our marketing efforts have failed, and in the past two years, we have had serious conversations about going out of business. The nearby (five miles) state park receives 3.5 million visitors per year, and we have only managed to get 1/10th of a percent of those visitors to make the five-mile trip to our business.
Perhaps our greatest frustration has been the lack of support from local environmental groups and the local media. Despite our clear record of growing our pollinator population, statewide environmentalists seem unwilling to acknowledge our efforts or share our successes with their followers. Media seems so hellbent on “disaster journalism,” daily reminders that it’s the “end of the world as we know it” for pollinators, that we cannot pay to have our success story shared. I am hopeful that you folks will reverse that trend.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
I am currently the Director of Butterfly Ridge Butterfly Conservation Center, a for-profit environmental education facility in the Hocking Hills of Ohio. I am also the president of the non-profit Polygonia Foundation and treasurer of the Hocking Hills Wild Ones organization.
I am known for my work with butterflies. I started the Southwest Monarch Study in 2003 while I was the education director at the Boyce Thompson Arboretum. I also took care of the tropical butterfly exhibit at Franklin Park Conservatory in Columbus, Ohio for six years.
As mentioned previously, I am most proud of the degree to which we have grown our butterfly population on our 6th generation property in southeast Ohio. I am also very proud of our mothing work. We are slowly becoming recognized as one of the best places in Ohio to observe and learn about moths.
How do you define success?
Data!
Some environmentalists measure success by before and after pictures. In my opinion, before and after pictures are nothing more than pretty pictures. To know if the habitat is working, you need data, year after year, data collection regarding presence and absence of insect species and their abundance.
Although, as mentioned earlier, for our business, at some point, success must be measured by admission tickets. If we want to stay open and continue to teach folks about the importance of pollinators and attracting those pollinators to their residential landscapes. We need on-site and off-site audiences.
Pricing:
- $6/person admission to Butterfly Ridge
- $100 speaker fee to speak to off-site groups
Contact Info:
- Website: www.butterfly-ridge.com
- Instagram: butterfly.ridge
- Facebook: Butterfly Ridge Butterfly Conservation Center ltd
- Youtube: @chriskline6488
Image Credits
Jackie Davis
Chris Kline
