Date: 9/20/2023
Recently I released a monarch butterfly that I had watched grow from an egg to a caterpillar. It then formed a chrysalis, where in 12 days it was transformed to a creature that is now flying back to an ancestral winter home in Mexico that it has never seen.
It will have to find food along the way, the sweet nectar of many common wildflowers growing this time of year. And to reach its destination it will have to be lucky enough to evade natural predators, heat, storms and the pesticides it will find in many gardens.
Its species’ luck has been running out. Monarch populations are down 90%. Climate change has played a part. But it also has had to contend with the loss of its winter homes in the oyamel fir forests, a very special habitat found in a small remote mountainous area in Mexico.
If this butterfly makes it to Mexico, it will spend the winter clinging to these fir trees with millions of its kind (the number used to be in the billions). Come spring, it will start the first of a four-generation journey north, where it will reproduce and then die in Texas. Its children, and grand-children, and great-grandchildren will continue the spring migration until they end up back in New England around July and August.
For this part of the journey, they will need to find milkweed plants, the only food their caterpillars will eat. If gardeners can find a place for a patch of milkweed in their pesticide-free yard, they can help ensure that this beautiful migration continues.
Mary J. Metzger
Westfield
