Tag Archives: Monarch butterfly

The Year’s Last Monarch

Leave a reply

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.

Fifty Cents a Year for Monarch Butterflies

Leave a reply

The first bird my mother taught me to recognize was a robin. And the first butterfly she taught me was the monarch.

This was in South County, Rhode Island, but I imagine that millions have had much the same experience, learning the big, bright-red monarch before anything else.

The monarch does no one any harm (and who of us can say the same about ourselves?). It lays its eggs on milkweed leaves, and the caterpillars crunch away at the leaves before spinning cocoons and going into their sleep. Since milkweeds are considered a nuisance plant, the caterpillars are actively doing good in the world.

Once they emerge as butterflies, the monarchs sip nectar from flowers, or lick salt from mud flats. They fill the world with beauty, keep the milkweed in check, and never do harm.

But just about every year, they grow fewer and fewer. I had been concerned by seeing so few this year, and now I’m reading reports of severe losses over the past year, in part due to bad weather.

These beautiful butterflies are especially endangered because of their own migration patterns. They spread out east of the Rockies up as far as southern Canada, but most of them overwinter in Mexico, in a space smaller than Schuyler County. Whenever ANYTHING goes wrong in that small space, millions of monarchs may die. Even felling a single tree might kill a thousand hibernating butterflies.

There are many good causes – there are even many good causes simply looking at our environment – and it’s impossible to support them all. My money goes to the National Audubon Society, with its century-long history of fighting for us by fighting for the earth. Audubon helps monarchs in several ways, such as preserving habitat (including milkweed) and helping with tagging studies.

But while I focus on Audubon, earlier this month I grabbed an Environmental Defense Fund mailing to one of our sons, and was almost immediately writing a $35 check.

That check will help underwrite an acre of Monarch Butterfly Habitat Exchange land. (And with a 2-for-1 matching grant, that parleys into three acres.) E.D.F. pays farmers (mostly) to keep land as suitable monarch habitat (often including milkweed), or to restore monarch land.

This helps maintain migratory corridors, much as Seneca Park Zoo in Rochester is doing with its delightful Butterfly Beltway program, which has now been in operation for nearly 20 years.

Humphrey Nature Center, at Letchworth State Park, has been operating a program that raises, tags, and releases monarchs.

Donating $35 is the least I can do for a species that has given me nothing but joy for almost 70 years. Fifty cents a year. That’s worth it, for sure.

A Good Year for Monarch Butterflies — at Last!

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.

The March of the Monarchs

In the hot hot week of the Fourth of July, we made the latest of our many visits to the Mystic Marinelife Aquarium. Part of the fun there (even on hot hot days) is making your way along a concrete “sidewalk,” on one side of which are pools for seals and sea lions.

*On the other side is southeastern Connecticut: granite, high grasses, maples, catbirds, croaking frogs, and plenty more. And on one long stretch, I was filled with joy to see, is a monarch migration stop.

*Monarch butterflies, their large orange wings veined with striking black, are easy to spot and easy to identify… even a child can do it, and I hope most children do… it’s often the first, and sometimes the only, butterfly they learn.

*The simple excitement of identification may well change the child’s life. Identify one type of butterfly, and the world suddenly has twice as many butterfiles – this type, and all the others. Learning to spot the monarch may open a lush, overflowing world of nature.

*Monarchs are beautiful, always a joy to see. Unlike any of us, they do absolutely no harm to anyone in the world. They even lay their eggs on the broad leaves of the milkweed, so the caterpillar feasts its whole life on a plant that’s been rated as a pest.

*In their mature butterfly form monarchs sip nectar, and as the flit from blossom tto blossom they join with the bees in pollinating the planst and the flowers that bring us so much joy.

*One end of their range is well to the north and east of us, while the other is in Mexico and Central America. That’s why they need these migration stops, especially as we chew through the natural world and their normal habitat.

*Everybody has to eat, to be sure. But it’s a sorry business that kills off butterflies.

*Here in our neck of the woods Seneca Park Zoo works a Butterfly Beltway program, designed to create safe havens in and around Rochester. Our Department of Transportation… one of New York State’s biggest landowners… has created corridors along which butterfly gardens are spotted on DOT land.

*Few of us would try to fly from Maine to Mexico on paper-thin wings, and few monarchs actually make it. It’s often a multi-generational journey, perhaps two northward and two southward to make a round trip in a single year.

*So they need to rest, recuperate, and shelter as they struggle on. They need to sip nectar. They need milkweed on which to lay their eggs. Since we’ve largely forbidden nature to provide such spaces we need to provide them ourselves. Doing so is a supremely humane act.

*It’s true that we’re acting, in part, in self-interest; we need the pollinators. But it’s also true that we rush to succor these most fragile, most delicate of creatures. And that almost every heart thrills, in great age as it did in early childhood, to the flash and flit of orange in the lawn.

Monarchs and Me

Leave a reply

Maybe the hard frost on the seventeenth put an end to it, but at least through Saturday the fourteenth I was seeing quite a few monarch butterflies… never as many as I’d like, but gratifyingly more than I’d expected.

*It’s late in the season, and probably late in their lives, and some are clearly struggling. The one that lit right in front of me on the Letchworth Trail last month had a corner of one wing missing. One that flew in front of my car in Canisteo seemed struggling to stay aloft, and so have some of those I’ve seen in Bath.

*But the one I saw at Mossy Bank Park appeared in fine fettle, and so did the ongoing stream that crossed Post Road in Hartsville every few minutes, bound for the south’ard.

*Monarchs are one of our most recognizable butterflies, rivaled in that respect only by the eastern tiger swallowtail, which is (usually) a bright yellow trimmed with black. The monarch is orange, veined and trimmed with black, and both butterflies are big. They’re probably the first butterflies most kids learn to recognize, and for many folks may be the only ones that they learn through their lives.

*Monarch life is one of nature’s greatest sagas. Those heading south now will, if they survive, make it (on paper-thin wings) across the ocean to Mexico, Cuba, or other warm climes to spend the winter. As bright-leaved spring comes on they will make their way back toward us… but in many cases, will never arrive. Along their way they lay eggs, mostly on milkweed. They hatch as larvae, pupate, and emerge as butterflies. Then they take up the journey, making their way north.

*A round trip may take four generations.

*Since thousands over overwinter in small concentrated areas, monarchs are in grave danger from habitat destruction. The loss of a few acres could mean a population collapse.

*A few months ago, stopping at the I-390 rest area near Mount Morris, I noticed a sign pointing to a monarch butterfly garden. I strolled over in that direction, and the result might have been choreographed by a movie director… “All right, action, enter, walking walking walking – cue the monarch!” Just as I reached the garden a monarch flew straight up to eye level, directly in front of me.

*This garden is part of a joint project between Seneca Park Zoo and the state Department of Transportation. The Zoo has a “Butterfly Beltway” program helping people maintain their gardens so as to encourage butterflies. The highway project leads to planting and mowing being done in such a way as to make a safe flyway for the fall migration.

*Monarchs are one of the finest creatures on God’s earth. They do no one the slightest bit of harm – their larvae even eat plant species such as milkweed, which are generally rated as pests. Sighting a monarch always creates a moment of beauty and joy. My wife and I are still awe-struck by the singular time, some years ago, when 800 monarchs passed over us, heading south, along Mitchellsville Road near Bath.

*As a young boy in Rhode Island I caught butterflies in our back yard, using a net made by my uncle with mesh sewn by my aunt. I put them into jars (lent by my mother) with some grasses, and covered the jars with aluminum foil in which I poked air holes with a fork. I looked to see if I could find them in “The First Book of Butterflies,” given to me by my parents. And very very soon, I set them free. Some of them were monarchs, perhaps the ancestors of those I see here and now, 220 generations removed. Good for you, D.O.T. Good for you, Seneca Park Zoo. A monarch is a little flash of glory. There’s nothing like it in the world.