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Posts Tagged ‘monarch habitat loss’

Passage

Posted in Nature, The Garden, tagged , on August 30, 2025| Leave a Comment »

‘Tis the season for monarch butterflies in my garden, a broad oasis for butterflies, hummingbirds, pollinators, and passer-by.

For the last several weeks, a solitary monarch has lived here, finding a diversity of blooms and milkweed. Stopping each day in the garden outside my office, it finds the flowers there and flutters on. The only thing lacking was company of its kind.

Four days ago, another monarch arrived. They floated and gamboled high in the sky, and there is no more beautiful sight. Together and apart, they worked their way around the gardens. Yesterday, I watched them follow each other, first one, then the other, to the many tithonia growing here.

Today, expecting to see the two of them, there was only, again, a solitary monarch. I walked to each part of the garden, expecting to see another butterfly lift off, but only a singular monarch floated above and beyond me as I walked.

Rounding on another garden, I saw a bit of orange in the grass.  Still and lifeless, a monarch butterfly lay as if it had fluttered softly down and passed on. From the wear on its wings, my guess is that it was the monarch that waited.  A few brilliant days with good company, and its brief two-to-five-week lifespan ended.

Threatened by habitat loss, pesticide use, and climate change, the population of eastern monarchs has declined by more than 80 percent, according to the World Wildlife Federation. The monarch butterfly was classified as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in 2022. The US Fish & Wildlife Service proposed the monarch butterfly for protection under the Endangered Species Act in December 2024.

Unlike so many ecological crises, there are positive steps individuals can take to help save the monarchs. With even a small space you can plant a few milkweeds or create a Monarch Waystation.  Many of the milkweed and nectar plants that support the monarch life cycle are inexpensive, easy to grow, resilient and drought-resistant once established.

Among other resources, Monarch Watch is a great information and citizen science website established at the University of Kansas in 1992. As of August, 2025, there are 52,932 registered Monarch Waystations across the US. Check out the sites in your state.  While the migration of monarch butterflies used to darken the sky as they passed by, today the existence of the butterfly is in question.  Maybe, with enough help, they will survive.

The newly arrived monarch has taken up residence. It flits and floats, maybe it hopes. I know I do.

* * *

Epilogue:  The next day, another monarch arrived.  In the days that followed, there were as many as four at a time in different gardens. And more are rising from the garden itself, the last generation of the season, which will live six to nine months if they survive their autumn migration of almost 3,000 miles to central Mexico.  Godspeed.

 

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Ode to Longshot

Posted in Nature, Reflections on the everyday, The Garden, tagged , , on October 10, 2013| Leave a Comment »

It has been just about a year since Longshot, a late season Monarch butterfly I once knew.

Brought inside from freezing November cold, Longshot emerged from its chrysalis too late, with stiff wings.  Passing on amidst fine fresh cut flowers and greenery, Longshot had a view of a sky he or she never touched.

Buried under the milkweed in my garden, I have visited Longshot as the winter and my legal ordeal wore on.  Spring and summer came, with some luck the worst part of a high conflict custody matter is behind me.

Come autumn, the garden is again a riot of bursting seed pods, crimson grass, yellow leaves, azure and purple sage.  Color to rival summer in every way, hummingbirds only now trailing away.

The spell of autumn is different, tales of things that come to pass, like Longshot, or custody trials and the ill they weave, decaying in their time.

Though globally, monarch populations continue to decline,  more visited my garden this season than any year prior.

Here is to you Longshot, for the will to live in the toughest of times and the heart to come again in the spring, eternity is yours.

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While I am at it

Posted in Nature, Reflections on the everyday, tagged , , on October 5, 2011| 1 Comment »

Yesterday my youngest went on a nature walk with his class around the wetland area surrounding the school campus.  While surveying a stand of milkweed, he was thrilled to locate  a monarch caterpillar noshing on a leaf and excitedly shared his find with the class.

We went back after school today to take a look at our newly found friend.  My son ran ahead of me on the boardwalk built to protect the environs, only to reappear seconds later downcast.  The milkweed stand, some two feet away from the boardwalk had been mowed, only shards of stems and ragged leaves remained — gone too was the young caterpillar.

This  mishap echoes the greater decimation of milkweed across the United States.  As the primary host plant of the monarch butterfly, milkweed  has come under attack from habitat development, herbicide use – and errant human aesthetics – of the kind that mowed the native habitat in our wetland.

We take so much, we give so little.  In my small garden I cultivate five different varieties of milkweed, provide cover, shade and water.  It does not touch the loss of one or  one million acres of lost milkweed – but at least it exists.  Do you want to keep breathing oxygen?  Plant a tree.  Want to see beauty on the wing?  Plant a milkweed.   Think global, act local, as they say.

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