The Monarch butterfly population is down at least 85% in the last 20 years. An area about the size of Texas which used to support their SOLE food plant, in fields, fence rows, marginal land areas, and so forth, has been sprayed so many times with herbicides, has been planted with GMO crops containing pesticides (Which kills butterflies. Thank you Dow, Monsanto.) that they have no breeding grounds left.
The Fish and Wildlife Service is considering listing them as "Endangered" and putting them on the protected species list.
Also remember, MANY other species depend on these insects for food. They are also a significant pollinator, and the sole pollinator of a few plant species. (Butterflies are nowhere near as effective as bees in general, which are ALSO under the gun from all the spraying and GMO crap crops, but they are still a significant pollination vector.)
If you like the pretty black and orange flutterers, would like to show them to your children and grandchildren, OTHER THAN SPREAD-WINGED IN A MUSEUM WITH A PIN STUCK IN, don't spray everything with poisons and let some scrub or edge areas grow milkweed. And don't plant GMO crops with pesticides built in, there is NO knowing what that crap is killing, or doing to us OR the environment. (And we're not being allowed to FIND OUT, either, thank you again, Monsanto. They are fighting against research, and even against LABELING laws intended to give you the choice of GMO foods, or not!!)
Milkweed doesn't require any care or fertilizer or anything; it is easily eradicated if it spreads somewhere you cannot tolerate it, and it doesn't do any damage to anything or anyone else that I know of. It isn't like poison ivy or similar plants, I don't even know anyone with an allergy to it. (Undoubtedly, though, someone out there is....)
It's only a thin vine, and it grows almost anywhere. It can grow on the ground horizontally, though it prefers to climb other plants or fences, vertically. The seed pods can be pulled off before they ripen and open, if you need to slow the spread of the stuff.
The seeds are wind-borne on filaments like silk - they are quite effective at spreading, so if you have specimen or ornamental plantings to protect you need to keep an eye on it a bit. (Or just pull up any small young vines in the wrong places, that will kill it. It isn't really particularly invasive. We aren't talking kudzu here.)
Monarch caterpillars hatch from eggs laid SOLELY on this plant, and they eat nothing else but milkweed leaves. They harm nothing, and provide many other species with benefits. They NEED to survive.
The optimum solution would involve Monsanto and Dow stopping their scorched-earth campaigns, and letting things go back to the way they were not very many years ago. (Sometimes, "progress" ISN'T, despite the shouting of the corporate shills.)
That optimum solution would be nice, but we all know, especially in the present "Corporations Uber Alles," political climate ("Because they donate more!!"), with the Almighty Dollar reigning supreme and having its own "free speech," nothing will be done to haul these greedy bar-studs up short. And if some MIRACLE occurs and the Feds actually do something right, it will not be nearly in time. I think this is going to go down to the wire, and LOCAL ACTIVISM in the form of people growing some silly weeds is going to be needed to save them.
It isn't just scientific research that has noticed this drop in the flying-stained-glass-window population. We live in one of the small migration areas, just a tiny fraction of the butterflies which fly south for the winter come through here. But when I was a kid, Monarchs would come through in a trickle, which became rush for several days, covering entire trees of an evening with their gorgeous orange-gold wings and black-and-white-spotted bodies.
This doesn't happen any more, and hasn't done for years. Forget the late summer migration, you hardly see any of them at all now, the whole year through.
We feed butterflies (and birds, and provide houses for bats, and so forth) and grow plants and flowers to feed these and other species, and try to provide caterpillar habitat. Milkweed is one of these plants, along with bee balm and trumpet vines, several other species. You can too, even if it's just a pot on a windowsill or a spot in a vacant lot.
I miss seeing the Monarchs. I see the decline right here, and mourn the loss. Even ten years ago, I could count on them flying south in the late summer and covering the trees, flowers, and bushes in my back yard. There must have been a million of them, I would put out the feeders. One year I had about ten litres of sugar-water out in shallow feeder containers at one time, and had to re-fill them. Twice.
Now, a litre lasts all season. I make the syrup by the cup now instead of in a big jug.
If there are a hundred of them out back, it is a big event.
I taught my oldest grand-daughter how to sit still by putting a dab of sugar syrup on her hand and letting the Monarchs land to feed on it. It was simple, since it was a "target-rich environment." There were just thousands of them, all over the place, all she had to do was >hold very still< for a little while, and they would cover her hands, dipping their tongues into the sugar. ("It TICKLES!" )
She graduates from High School soon, and STILL remembers doing this at five or six years old. (The humming bird eating nectar from a feeder on her shoulder was fun, too.)
All these butterflies really need, and all I ask, is just some space for the common milkweed. The seeds are free for the taking from ditches and such, if you look a bit. I let milkweed grow on the fence line, amongst the (HEIRLOOM VARIETY, NON-HYBRIDIZED, NON-GMO!!) corn in our garden, and up the bank by the retaining wall on the north side of the property.
(By the way, the corn with milkweed growing next to and on it produces just the same as the corn without it. I've paid attention and checked. Then again, I'm not relying on sprays and chemicals for all the fertilizer and things which the corn needs. We use composts and manures, including green manure cover crops like buckwheat and clover. Perhaps that helps with solving the competition issues between the two species. It's an almost three-acre kitchen and local food pantry garden, I've discussed it in earlier blogs.)
We've been growing things for butterflies specifically for almost ten years now, which is why I still get those hundred butterflies, I guess. The data I get is not just 'anecdotal,' particularly not over that time span.
Spread the word around. It may be "just another bug," but their survival might be more important than you think.
And think of the lost beauty in this poor benighted planet when they are all dead.
