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And he did it without a net!

He is Professor Art Shapiro, who once again appears to have won his own contest for a pitcher of beer — based on the earliest verified catch of a cabbage white butterfly (Pieris rapae) in Yolo, Solano or Sacramento counties.

Shapiro, in the Department of Evolution and Ecology, has been running the contest for 40 years now, to draw attention to Pieris rapae and its first flight each season, in furtherance of his long-term studies of butterfly life cycles and climate.

He is in the field more than 200 days every year. And that is where he was at midday Jan. 31, in Suisun City, his oldest sampling site, dating from 1972. He said he does not recall the first cabbage white ever having been taken there, which explains why he went into the field without a net.

Yet that is exactly where he saw the white cabbage at 1:09 p.m. “It was taking nectar from flowers of field mustard (Brassica kaber) along a 6-foot fence facing the sun,” Shapiro said by e-mail.

He said he tried to catch it twice and failed both times. The butterfly then soared over the fence into someone’s back yard. "But I knew it wasn't as warm on the other side, and there probably wasn't anything in bloom, either,” he said. “So I figured I'd just wait to see if it came back.”

It did. “And I got it on my first try,” he said. Asked how he could catch an active butterfly by hand, Shapiro grinned and muttered: “experience.”

A few years ago, he said, he caught a very rare all-black mutant of the orange sulphur butterfly the same way.

Asked what he would have done if he had not been able to catch the white cabbage, Shapiro said the sighting is what mattered, not the specimen.

But, under the rules, without a live specimen, he cannot win the contest. “The specimen rule applies to everyone, including me,” he said. “I should know. I wrote the rules!”

So, in order to win, even he had to bring in a live specimen, so it could be verified as Pieris rapae.

This morning (Feb. 1), the day after his catch, Shapiro reported that the butterfly he caught “is alive, here in the lab, in the fridge, and has been verified by seven people.”

Of course, someone else could still show up with a live specimen, and a catch time earlier than Shapiro’s — and stake a claim to that free pitcher of beer.

But, for now, Shapiro looks to be the contest winner — and his graduate students are disappointed. To make up for it, Shapiro took them out for beer after work on Jan. 31 — and he bought the first pitcher! Four of his five students attended. “A good time was had by all,” he reported today.

Elizabeth Long was the first of his students to hear the news of his capture of a white butterfly. She immediately asked Shapiro if he was planning to go to South America in January 2012, to give someone else a chance to win.