Park rangers here at Baxter were shocked when, in the mid 1990s, federal agents raided the homes of a pest exterminator and two businessmen in California and Arizona and found thirty-seven Katahdin Arctic butterflies among a collection of twenty-two hundred rare insects. Their audacious poaching operation—agents found letters from one man advising the others to, if caught, say, “Sorry, I didn’t know you couldn’t catch butterflies here”—sparked the first federal case against butterfly poaching
