From all I can tell, and from what others tell me, it looks as though the monarch butterflies are having a very good year this year.
*GOOD! The monarchs are long overdue for a little good news.
*We’re just starting the second week in October, and today I saw a monarch flittering through Bath’s Pulteney Square, bound for the south’ard and the monarchs’ winter home. Frost kills the ones that are left behind when it strikes, but no frost is due soon. Perhaps this one will make it yet to its ancestral home in Mexico.
*Leading a walking tour in Bath last month… and one in July… and one in Wayland in June… I joyfully pointed out numerous monarchs along the way. I’m seeing them in Pleasant Valley, in Corning, in Penn Yan. When I’m at the lookout in Mossy Bank Park, monarchs rise up the face of the cliff and pass over my head. This year the atmosphere seems to be filled with them.
*What could be better? Who can breathe a word against monarchs? They might be the most beautiful of creatures, but I suppose that’s matter of of opinion. But surely no creature on earth compounds beauty and inoffensiveness to greater effect.
*What harm does a monarch ever do to anyone? It even lays its eggs on, and its caterpilars feed on, milkweed leaves… and on the milkweed alone. And as most of us observe, even with all that monarch munching, we face no danger of a milkweed shortage.
*Richard Gast, from Franklin County Cornell Cooperative Extension, reports that he and others have observed the same thing in the Adirondacks… more monarchs this year!
*Anurag Agrawal, Professor of Environmental Studies at Cornell, writes, “this year’s estimate [at the wintering ground in the Sierra Madre] is well over double compared to last year”… after thirty years of decline.
*A quick check on line finds similar reports from Wisconsin, Nebraska, Ontario, and Utah, and I hear it informally from Rhode Island, too.
*It MAY be that we are seeing benefits from the increasing number of migration pathways, monarch waystations, and plantings of late-blooming nectar producers… Seneca Park Zoo in Rochester sponsors a “Butterfly Beltway.” Even if so, they are still terrifyingly vulnerable, with their entire population concentrating from their breeding space of several millioins square miles down to a dozen mountaintops for winter.
*I loved betterflies when I was a little boy in Rhode Island, and I love them now. I can’t say this for sure, but I imagine that monarchs were the first butterflies my mother taught me to identify… I suspect that that’s true for most kids. I am now far, far closer to seeing my LAST butterfly than I am to the day when I saw my FIRST. When that last butterfly flits before my delighted eyes, I hope it’s a monarch.