Marissa Back of Seven Lakes will sometimes stand motionless for hours waiting for just the right shot of a passing butterfly.

A butterfly enthusiast since a child, she decided early on that she would rather photograph living butterflies for her collection instead of killing them and pinning them to a board.

She has butterflies living and reproducing in a small terrarium on her back porch.

Back will speak Saturday, Oct. 14, from 10:30 to 11:30 a.m. at the Pinehurst Village Assembly Hall on how to attract butterflies to your backyard. Her free talk will be entitled "Flying Flowers."

It is part of a series of public lectures sponsored by the Pinehurst Greenway Wildlife Habitat Committee that began last year.

Back, who is a grandmother, and her husband retired to Moore County 10 years ago.

"Butterflies have been a love of mine since I was just a kid," she says. "I realized in school that there has to be a better way to see butterflies up close and to keep them than killing them and pinning them to a board."

She has become something of a self-taught naturalist who can describe little-known but fascinating nuances about the cycles of butterflies, their mating habits and their food sources.

The process of an egg turning from a larva to caterpillar, to pupa, to chrysalis and then to a full-blown brightly colored fluttering adult is miraculous to her.

"A butterfly will grow to 3,000 times the size of what it was when it hatched," she said.

No Insecticides

Butterflies' sensors are in their feet, she says, where they'll learn if a plant they perch on is edible. They are programmed to feed and deposit eggs on a certain kind of plant, called a "host," she said. The type of plant depends on the type of butterfly, of which there are many different varieties.

"The beauty of understanding the butterfly by learning its life stages is that when you discover a butterfly is an insect along with beetles and ants, you begin to understand the whole cycle of life," she says.

As for attracting butterflies, she says, "you have to stop using all insecticides." Insecticides kill some of the beetles and grubs that some butterflies eat. If herbicides or fungicides are used on lawns and plants, any creature that eats the roots of the grass will die -- such as moles or voles -- along with the unwanted pest. Moles and voles are a food source for some animals, she says.

Certain organic bacilli are on the market now that kill Japanese beetles and their grubs, she said, but are not poisonous to any other plant or animal. The bacillus is attractive to the beetle, which eats it, but then it makes the insect sick and kills it.

Back recalls that Rachel Carson's book "Silent Spring" was published when she was in high school in the 1950s. At the time, environmental concerns had been limited in America to a handful of scientists. Most people were unaware of any dangers of chemicals such as DDT that were later banned by the federal government because they posed hazards to public health, wildlife and the environment.

Back's grown children have picked up the habit of not using insecticides and herbicides in their yards.

Developed Interest Early On

A master gardener, Back developed an early interest in nature from walks with her grandfather in the woods of West Virginia as a child.

"I've never been afraid of snakes or spiders," she said. "I developed my interest in nature early on."

While raising her own children in Akron, Ohio, she experimented with ways to attract butterflies. She enjoyed watching them.

"My grandchildren love it when they visit," she said.

On her porch, she has a four-foot-long planter filled with two kinds of parsley that is a favorite "host" for black swallowtail butterflies. Different butterfly species have different favored host plants, she said.

Studying the butterfly behavior has helped her learn what kind of plant a particular variety will be attracted to, because butterflies migrate much as birds do.

Also, like hummingbirds, butterflies dip their proboscises into a chosen flower for its nectar. They prefer those growing in full sunshine.

"It's location, location, location," she said, "and their need to fly. Butterflies will rest on an overcast day. They like to stay among a cluster of plants when they feed."

She learned much of this from a University of Toronto research project she helped with when she was raising her family in Ohio. The project involved tagging the migrating Monarch butterflies, writing down data about them, and checking newcomers for tags to figure out where they'd been and when.

Sara Lindau can be reached at 693-2473 or by e-mail at slindau@thepilot.com.