Tag Archives: monarch migration

Fifty Cents a Year for Monarch Butterflies

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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.