THE PLIGHT OF THE MONARCH
Conservationists working to reverse the crisis of a species in decline
BJ Del Conte’s head is barely visible above the tall wildflowers in a sunny meadow on the Leslie Spit.
His neck is raw from scratching at mosquito bites, but he pushes through the prickly thistles, yellow rocket and purple loosestrife that have overtaken this field.
“There used to be a grove of milkweed here,” he says, disappointed. “Now it’s been grown over by all this.”
Still, he persists, stumbling on the occasional clump and bending down to carefully examine it.
The milkweed’s bursts of pinkish-mauve mini blooms are fragrance manna to mother monarch butterflies who seek out this rapidly disappearing wildflower upon which to lay their eggs.
“Without milkweed, there is no monarch,” says Del Conte, a TV producer who plants it in his downtown Toronto garden. In past years, he has attracted monarchs whose larvae he has captured, fed more milkweed and sheltered until they emerge from their chrysalis and are able to fly away.
“Last year was the first year that I didn’t see any caterpillars.” LESLIE GIST HOPING FOR MONARCH NUMBERS TO SURGE
After an hour or so of picking his way through the meadow, he finally eyes one lone butterfly and what he believes to be three eggs. But he’s not sure. He carefully peels off the leaf to take home, hoping those three tiny white bubbles will one day become big, beautiful black-and-orange butterflies. Del Conte is part of Monarch Watch, one of an ever-growing number of organizations whose members are alarmed by the butterfly’s declining numbers. The immediate threat is to its miraculous migration, 5,000 kilometres from the northern latitudes of Canada’s provinces to its hibernation grounds in the remote oldgrowth forests of the Sierra Nevada of Mexico, hard-hit by illegal clearcutting, genetically modified crops en route, herbicides, weather extremes and, most important, the destruction of the essential milkweed, just about the only plant which its larvae eat. Which is why, earlier this year, Ontario’s agriculture ministry removed the milkweed from its noxious plants list in hopes its resurgence can help bring back the monarch. That, plus awareness campaigns by the David Suzuki Foundation and other organizations via social media, has led to crops of milkweed popping up in gardens all over the GTA, tucked among the hydrangeas, lilies and other perennials as if it always belonged. But milkweed has to make a comeback all the way up and down the monarch’s migratory paths, because the butterfly breeds at least twice before it gets here from Mexico. It’s usually the third generation that is born and lives in our gardens, where it gathers nectar and strength to breed yet another generation. That fourth generation is the one that wings back to Mexico, a trip it has never made before, to a place it has never known. That wondrous cycle is what has inspired retired nurse Bruce Parker to track, raise and tag monarchs in and around London, Ont., since1998.
“I have tagged over 2,500 monarchs and have had 17 recoveries in Mexico,” he says, adding that he is working on a research paper on the migration.
“This is the worst year on record,” he says. “But we won’t really know how bad it is until they count them in Mexico next February.”
In Lindsay, Ont., personal support worker Leslie Gist keeps planting milkweed in hope of seeing the monarch return to her garden in the numbers it used to.
“Last year was the first year that I didn’t see any caterpillars,” she recalls.
“It’s not looking good for the monarch.”
Ontario has removed milkweed from its noxious plants list to help Monarch numbers rebound
Both Parker and Gist report their “first sightings” to Journey North, a website that maps milkweed, larvae and the monarch’s progress as it migrates. This year, it received 31,000 sightings from 59,000 registered sites, 10 per cent of which are in Canada. Which sounds good, but probably isn’t.
Just after biologist Elizabeth Howard launched Journey North in 1994, the monarch population over-wintering in Mexico hit an estimated high of 1.049 billion.
Last year, that dropped to 33 million.
But Howard remains optimistic, despite the sobering numbers.
“We hope that the reason we are seeing so few now is maybe because it’s been a little cool and the monarchs are developing more slowly,” she says on the phone from her home in central Vermont.
“By Aug. 15, they’ll be ready to migrate. So what happens next month is really key.”
As for Del Conte, he’s not so sure: “The monarch I saw at the Spit was my first in two years. I used to say monarchs were a ‘pressured’ species. Now, I think ‘crisis’ is too small a word.”