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.