Late September. Edging into what perhaps is the most glorious time of year. The spilled-paint burst of color, the lovely temperatures, the clarity of the sky… not just the blue sky of the day’s vault, but also the starry cloak of night. The fun of the first frost. The delight, finally, of the season’s first sight of snow, up on the ridges and hilltops.
For all its joys, there’s a sorrow to it, too. The coming winter, for all its beauties and delights, will be tougher. Swimming’s over, and hiking will soon follow. Summer seems like a long-ago childhood memory. Most flowers are gone. Many birds and animals leave us in search of warmer dens, or sunnier shores.
One day, the year’s last monarch will flutter by. We won’t notice it at the time, but that’s what it will have been. Our lives will be a little sadder for the loss.
These orange glories are a delight to the eye, and a lesson to our morals. At no stage of their lives do monarchs do any harm.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if WE could say that.
Monarch butterflies once filled our summers, and once, near Bath, we actually saw a flock of hundreds winging south. But their numbers have dwindled and dwindled and dwindled, and it’s our fault, almost entirely. We’re wiping out a beautiful creature that never did us, or anyone else, any harm. What excuse could we have?
For everything else that we’ve killed off, or almost killed off, we can construct a justification that is at least comprehensible, even if it’s wrong. Tigers are big and dangerous, and kill our livestock. Our technology needed the components that we rendered from whale carcasses. A poor subsistence farmer could keep his family alive for two or three days by trapping a few dozen passenger pigeons.
No one ever gained a thing from killing a monarch.
We kill them indirectly, by destroying their habitat or poisoning their environments. But we still kill them, when we should cherish and protect them.
Spring and summer spread the monarchs over much of North America – northern Mexico, the 48 states, southern Canada. Nearly all of the monarchs overwinter in a very small area, usually under 10 acres, in Mexico.
The Fish and Wildlife Service recently showed that in fifteen years, almost a billion of these butterflies had been lost.
That’s a staggeringly bad record.
Just as monarchs do us no harm, some people could argue that they also don’t do us any good. Apart from being pollinators they don’t affect us economically. They don’t impact the bottom line.
That being so, why bother to save them? What difference does it make? How would we justify the cost?
Those would all be very good questions, IF we were materialists. If we lived only for the almighty dollar. If we had no compassion on a helpless creature. If we cared nothing for the happiness of children. If we only wanted lives that could be totted up on a balance sheet, and if we were too terrified to step OFF that sheet into the dangers – and the joys – of our world.
The season’s last monarchs are fluttering southward. Notice them as they go.