Instead of running with his gang, Bonner, now 27, roams the rugged hills of California's Palos Verdes peninsula, trying to make it habitable for a rare species of butterfly found nowhere else on earth. The Palos Verdes blue or Glaucopsyche lygdamus palosverdesensis—the name rolls easily off Bonner's tongue—flies only from February through April. For the rest of the year, it metamorphoses from fertilized egg to caterpillar to pupa. Individuals exist as butterflies for only five days. To ensure that adult blues propagate, Bonner spends most of the year clearing away brush and sowing the seeds of the only two plants the blues will eat.
"One of the great things about Arthur is that he treats the butterflies as equals," says Travis Longcore, an assistant manager of the conservation project. "It's funny, but he understands how hard it is to be a butterfly."
Bonner, whose work is chronicled in America's Endangered Species, a National Geographic special (airing Jan. 24 at 8 p.m. ET on NBC), says he owes his own metamorphosis to these fragile lepidopterans. "They actually kept me from being extinct as much as I'm saving them from being extinct," he says.
The second youngest of five children, Bonner was born into rural poverty in Crestview, Fla., about 20 miles from the Alabama border. His father was a logger, his mother a home nurse. He was 8 when the family moved in with relatives in South Central L.A. Small and scrawny, he was often bullied by bigger kids. "I just had to learn to fight," says Bonner, now a trim 6'2". Fists, then guns, became his weapons of choice. In sixth grade he came to the aid of a Crip in a fight by firing a.25 automatic in the air. The gang took him in and nicknamed him Bub. Dropping out of school at 13, he began selling drugs, stealing cars and chilling out in juvenile detention centers. "Our grandmother taught us better," says his sister Ernestine, now 32. "But when you're a man around the neighborhood, you're either in [a gang] or you're out."
It was during his prison term at Susanville, Calif., that 18-year-old Bub began to distance himself from the Crips. "I realized I was through with that kind of life because I had a kid now," Bonner says, referring to Aaron, his newborn son, now 10, with then-girlfriend Telicia (he has another son, Arthur, 4, with a second ex-girlfriend). "I knew it was time for me to be a man and stop hurting people." Released from jail at 22, he joined the Los Angeles Conservation Corps, a work program aimed at giving at-risk youths a fresh start. Assigned one day to clear brush behind the L.A. airport, Bonner says, "I saw a sign that said, 'El Segundo Blue Butterfly Habitat.' I said, 'How can a butterfly have a habitat when they can just fly over the gate?' "
Dr. Rudi Mattoni, a UCLA geography professor and the conservation project's leader, assured him the Segundos would stay put as long as they could thrive there. Bonner avidly read the books Mattoni gave him on habitats and planting and was soon volunteering on weekends.
"He was just a great worker and a neat guy," says Mattoni, who in 1994 hired Bonner (at $26,000 a year) to help save the Palos Verdes blues. Last year, the National Wildlife Federation gave both men an award for outstanding work in conservation. Bonner, who lives alone in a small studio apartment in Hawthorne, Calif., now leads inner-city kids on field trips. He admits that he still gets grief from some people in his old neighborhood. "They would say, 'You got a woman's job, working with butterflies, and even now they make fun," he says. "It doesn't bother me. I just say, 'As long as I can live.' "
MICHAEL A. LIPTON
ELIZABETH LEONARD in Hawthorne
- Contributors:
- Elizabeth Leonard.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
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