Gulf News

A long summer ends without butterflie­s

- MARGARET RENKL ■ Margaret Renkl is a contributi­ng opinion writer who covers flora, fauna, politics and culture in the American South.

How ragged we are now, dragging summer behind us like an old blanket we can’t set down. The homicidal heat of August has given way to the merely cruel heat of mid-September, but we are done with it even so. Everyone is cross, and not just the people.

The impatient squirrels bite into the green acorns and then fling them to the ground. Unripe, they lie in tatters under the white oak tree. It has been a troubling summer in the yard. I have so much passionflo­wer, the host plant for gulf fritillary butterflie­s, but this year there hasn’t been a single caterpilla­r on my passionflo­wer vines. The parsley I planted for the black swallowtai­ls is also unmolested. All summer long, I have seen just six butterflie­s. One was a female monarch, but she ignored all my milkweed plants, the only food monarch caterpilla­rs can eat. Worn and faded, she stayed only long enough to feed from the zinnias.

What could explain a summer without butterflie­s? The late-spring freeze, the way habitat is diminishin­g all around me, my neighbours’ increasing reliance on pesticides? It’s been a scant year for butterflie­s in Middle Tennessee generally, according to friends with their own pollinator gardens, so perhaps this loss is owing to all of those reasons combined. I am so tired of this summer bereft of butterflie­s.

The buzz of bees

The mornings are a gift. Cool and damp, they feel like part of an entirely different ecosystem. If I’m poking around the garden early enough, I can spy all the darling bumblebee butts deep in the bells of balsam flowers where the bees have tucked themselves in for sleep. One morning I brushed against a balsam stalk without meaning to, and the sleeping bee backed out of her bed, reared up, and waved her bumblebee arms at me.

Every afternoon, our fledgling red-tail hawk returns to the neighbourh­ood, crying as it flies. It has been crying for so long that at least one blue jay has learnt to copy it. I’ve seen a blue jay deploy an imitation hawk call as a way to clear a bird feeder of rivals, but I took all my seed-feeders down weeks ago. This jay seems mainly to be entertaini­ng itself, calling out desperate baby hawk cries, just for the fun of it.

I took my feeders down because there’s no need for them this time of year. The spent zinnias and coneflower­s and black-eyed Susans provide plenty of seeds, and the beautyberr­ies, arrowwood berries and pokeweed berries are ripe now, too. They all feed our resident birds and any migrants that light in these trees on their journey. Soon the acorns will be ripe, and the Eastern red cedar cones and the American holly berries — enough for the squirrels and everyone else. Not everyone will survive. A basilica orb-weaver spider has built her cathedral outside our front door. Her web has been pummeled by rains again and again, but her pearly egg sacs, all strung together in a row, are safe. Every day I check them to be sure, and every day their mother watches me warily as I check.

She will guard them faithfully until she dies, and the last thing she will do is secure the guy wires they’ll need to guide them when they climb out of their sacs next spring. I have never seen the translucen­t spiderling­s emerge to run along those strands into safe cover, but I will keep watch when the time is right. Always hoping.

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