Where Have All the Moanrchs Gone and What We Can Do About It, May 2024:
Butterflies have graced our planet for at least 70 million years, bees 130 million years, and wasps 240 million years. As part of the great intricate tapestry of life, they have played a vital role, busily pollinating flowers, vegetables, fruits, and trees. In the past few decades, these beautiful and dynamic creatures have been disappearing at an alarming rate. Nature has endowed butterflies with amazing coping and protective mechanisms, camouflage, mimicry, elusive maneuvering and chemical defenses, but the onslaught to their wellbeing has been relentless, accelerating in the 21st century. The culprits are many including: climate change, abundant use of pesticides, pollution, and habitat loss.
Until I moved next door twenty years ago and invited all these butterflies to my gardens, my neighbor says he had never paid much attention to the seventy or so species native to this area. As many of you know, encountering a butterfly up close and personally stirs something within, a sense of wonder and amazement, a bit of magic is afloat in our gardens, as if the flowers themselves took flight in glorious colors and patterns.
Climate change has drastically affected all life as weather patterns have changed, more frequent super storms occur, too much precipitation in too short amount of time causing floods, or too little rain resulting in droughts and out-of- control wildfires, or snow falling in the mountains of Mexico.
There were drought conditions in October 2023 along the monarchs’ southward migration route contributing to a small winter population. Indications are that even though their northward journey has started a month earlier again this year, there are enough young milkweeds emerging just in the nick of time for the exhausted females to lay their eggs. It takes one generation of monarchs migrating south in the fall, traveling over 2,000 miles to a place to which they have never before been and two to three generations to complete their northward migration. Migrating monarchs live about ten months, summer ones about three weeks.
After raising, releasing, and tagging monarchs for five years, in 1977 I went in search of their winter hideaway in the mountains of Mexico, the exact location unknown at the time. It took two months of climbing mountains before I was guided to an estimated 100 million monarchs mating on the first day of Spring. Engaged in a magnificent aerial ballet, it was a spectacle like none other, a most amazing ancient ritual that had been occurring for millennium. The reality far surpassed the dream.
I have returned almost every year, living among the monarchs, tagging them to study their northward migration and working on reforestation projects while helping the mountain women develop and sell their crafts. Every year the population of monarchs fluctuated, from 30 million to over 100 million on any of the thirteen mountains they chose as the destination for their amazing migration from Canada and the United States. When I was allowed to camp among the butterflies in 1978 and ‘79, my guide and I explored the sixty or so acres atop Cerro Pelon, in and among millions upon millions of monarchs, ancient souls in a sacred gathering.
Much has changed over the last half century. This sacred place became known, roads were built, mountain guides trained and thousands upon thousands of tourists came to witness this miracle of the monarchs. Since the start of the 21st century, the many challenges to butterflies and pollinators have accelerated; their populations have further plummeted, numbers hardly rebounding. Since 2014, the monarch population has fluctuated between three and six million on a couple of acres. For the first time in anyone’s memory, there were no monarchs on Cerro Pelon this year where it was very cold. There were a few million on nearby mountains.
The timing of monarchs’ migration has changed dramatically with a warming world. For all creatures, great and small, timing is everything. With their migration delayed a month in Autumn and beginning a month earlier in the Spring, the question becomes will there be enough nectar to fuel their flight and will there be enough milkweed ready for the females who are laden with about four hundred eggs each. Only about ten percent of the eggs will survive to complete their metamorphosis due to all the challenges they face in every stage of their lives.
On November 5th 2012, Southwest Airlines, flew a late emerging monarch and me from Albany to San Antonio to complete her migration. By 2014, I flew 60 late monarchs to San Antonio on the Day of the Dead, November 1st. Now, they are on their own; all we can do is provide for them as best we can in our gardens.
What can we do as individuals? Garden!! Create green corridors of gardens, whether a window box or 40 acres, in our front back and back yards, along our roadways, in our municipalities, and our cities too. There is one sure way to make our gardens beautiful and our agriculture fruitful while enriching the soil, storing carbon, and keeping methane from our landfill. Compost!
Compost can help save the world besides making all your plants healthy and vigorous. Composting not only enriches the soil, but reduces methane from forming when throwing organic matter into the garbage. According to the Drawdown Project by Princeton, composting is one of the most effective solutions in dealing with climate change. Even a quarter inch of compost spread over one acre can absorb ten tons of carbon! Compost is a natural way to provide nutrients to plants, enhancing productivity while storing carbon in soils.
I love compost, an incredible example of transformation. Watermelon rinds and coffee grinds become rich silky dark soil, a/k/a black gold. More individuals as well as communities are engaged in composting, including the town of Saugerties and the City of Kingston, which has recently launched Phase 1 of its Organics Program, a food waste diversion program free and voluntary for all City of Kingston residents. In its fight against both climate change and rats, New York City has embarked on a mandatory separation of trash, thus avoiding 8 million pounds of organic waste every day being thrown into landfills. Mandatory composting programs have thrived over the past decade in cities such as San Francisco; Portland, Oregon, Seattle, Denver and Boulder. Boston, Pittsburgh and Jacksonville, Florida are now initiating composting infrastructure.
Get on board, help save the planet. It is mind boggling that one third of food produced worldwide is wasted. We all have to make an effort, a sincere commitment to make our environment healthy for all creatures, including us humans. If everyone in the U.S. composted their food waste, it would be the equivalent of taking almost eight million cars off the road, besides the added benefits of storing carbon naturally and reducing methane emissions.
Pesticides, yikes! Oh my, how we’ve been bamboozled. Introduced after World War II by the munitions makers who needed to transform their chemicals to another cash cow, they disseminated information and propaganda about the virtues of pesticides and chemical fertilizers through the advent of a new medium in the early 1950’s, the television. I vividly remember the image of dandelions withering with application. Clover, a natural fertilizer, was another enemy of the ‘idyllic’ perfectly uniform green expanse. My lawns look like beautiful multi-colored carpets with wild violets, (host plant for fritillaries), wild strawberries, its flowers providing sweet nectar, clover, and plantain, both host and nectar sources. Plantain can be chewed and applied to an insect bite or sting for immediate relief.
The early bees and butterflies rely on early spring flowers, one being the bright dandelion whose nectar is medicinal, boosting bees’ and butterflies’ immune systems. The war on dandelions and clover is still going on after all these years of research and information. Ever newer ‘improved’ and deadlier chemicals are being used on our lawns and in agriculture as some insects have evolved to become more resistant with extra added ingredients from Agent Orange added to Roundup, the mostly widely used herbicide in the world. Lawns use about eighty million pounds of it per year, while Big Agriculture uses about three hundred million pounds compared to eleven million in the 1980’s. Amazingly, lawns actually use more per acre than in agriculture. Needless to say, it is a multi billion-dollar industry. Let’s all stop contributing to these companies enrichment to our own detriment.
Not to dwell on dangers from chemicals, but there is a direct correlation between its increased use and the demise of pollinators. When a seed of any plant is coated with a neonicitinoid, this pesticide is in every molecule of the plant, stem, leaf, flower, and nectar. In the nicotine family, bees quickly become addicted, ingest too much and soon perish. Where you buy your plants truly matters. The big box stores have been implored, inundated with petitions to discontinue selling perfectly beautiful looking plants that are destroying our pollinators. Almost half of all garden plants in the U.S. are bought in big box stores, thus having a huge impact. Big box stores offer such a tempting display of colorful plants that lures us all but leads to pollinators demise. Ask before you buy. Local sources are listed below.
According to NRDC, 150 million acres of milkweed habitat has been lost in the United States in the last two decades, as pesticide use has dramatically increased. Iowa alone has lost 98% of its milkweed. Milkweed is the only host plant for a monarch and a great nectar source for many pollinators. Without any milkweed breeding monarchs have no place to lay their eggs, another way of destroying the population.
We can accomplish so much with our gardens; by composting, by not using pesticides, and by planting appropriate native host and nectar plants for many of the seventy species native to this area. A few, like the Mourning Cloak, Red Admiral and Comma butterflies overwinter in their adult state, finding shelter in crevices, emerging on warm mid winter days to nectar on dung when all else is covered in snow. You could provide a slice of orange or banana for an extra treat. Our gardens can offer blooms from early spring all the way through late autumn, from dandelions, columbines, foxglove and lilacs to asters, sedums, joe-pye weed, goldenrods, and ironweed, to name a few.
Since each species of butterfly has a particular host plant, many species of butterflies can be seen in a flower filled meadow because they know how to share nectar and do not have to worry about competition among their caterpillars.
It is going to take a concerted effort by all of us individually and in our communities to create nourishing corridors of gardens that will sustain, not poison, our pollinators, so vital to their survival and ours. Each one of us has to take responsibility for the little piece of earth upon which we stand while taking into consideration future generations.
Find inspiration for your garden along the Pollinator Trail of the Scenic Byway. Flutter like a butterfly to explore the various and varied community pollinator gardens in our midst, from Hurley to Andes. Visit the Catskill Mountains Scenic Byway website: www.ScenicCatskills.com to learn about the community pollinator gardens and updates on new and exciting efforts to expand our pollinator gardens in our communities. Want to get involved? email: chamber@centralcatskills.com