Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
‘I do it for the butterflies’: Monarchs rule this home
CHAMBERSBURG » Vonnie Black follows the erratic first flight of a monarch butterfly.
She smiles. She’s seen it hundreds of times.
“They are just so amazing,” Black said.
The great grandmother has been raising the orange and black butterflies for more than 20 years from her home in Hamilton Township.
“I’ve let 200 go for the year,” she said. “Things were different this year. I’ve had more monarchs and worms than I’ve ever had. The butterflies came in July. They usually come in August. They never come in July. I think I’ve already had two generations.”
The generation currently hatching will make a 2,000-mile flight to overwinter near Mexico City. Black says the caterpillars are “huge,” larger than the previous generation.
After a winter in Mexico this longest-lived generation of monarchs will migrate north in March to Texas. Their descendants, each living for just two to six weeks, will move north for three or four more generations before another “supergeneration” returns to the same forest in Mexico.
“Once I was in the garden, and I saw a worm. Before I could pick it up, a crazy-looking bug came and stabbed it. The worm died before my eyes.”
Cultivating curiosity
The monarch population east of the Rocky Mountains is in trouble. Numbers fell by a billion between 1999 and 2012, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The agency is considering putting the insect on the endangered species list. A decision is due by June 2019.
Craig Wilson, a researcher with Texas A&M University, estimates the monarch population at 124 million -- down 15 percent from last year, probably because of cold weather and winter storms. The monarch’s lowest population was 34 million in 2013-14. The butterflies are counted annually during winter at Mexican reserves.
Black has been trying to do a small part to help the monarchs ever since that summer 20 years ago when she and her granddaughter saw a caterpillar on a bicycle and captured the curiosity.
Black doesn’t count her butterflies but estimates she will release more than 400 this year, one of her best.
Black picks up monarch eggs and caterpillars from her garden. She keeps them in a hodgepodge of containers in her garage.
“They are so tiny,” Black said. “They just need to be protected. We try to save as many as we can. There are so many predators that eat the eggs and the baby worms.
“Once I was in the garden, and I saw a worm. Before I could pick it up, a crazy-looking bug came and stabbed it. The worm died before my eyes.”
Black’s nursery spans the edges of the garage. Styrofoam containers lie on their sides. Caterpillars fatten themselves on milkweed leaves. One of the yellow-black-white ringed worms has anchored itself to the top edge and hangs in a ‘J’ shape. It will transform into a chrysalis in a day. Others in golden-necklaced chrysalises are undergoing a 10-day metamorphosis. Five have hatched, and the adult monarchs slowly pump their wings as they dry. She picks one up.
“It’s a nice thing when you raise them, they have no fear of you,” she said.
A faint odor comes from a box of caterpillars with large black specks at the bottom.
“That’s the reason you have to clean them every day,” Black said. “All they do is eat and poop. It takes a lot of food.”
Food is milkweed. She gives them fresh leaves every day. The largest section of her small garden is devoted to milkweed, but the monarchs’ good year has left her slim pickings. She collects the leaves where she can. The caterpillars aren’t choosey about what kind of milkweed, she said.
“I found a good field, but the farmer mowed it down,” Black said.
Unstable ‘monarchy’
Wilson and other researchers say that more milkweed is needed for the monarch’s long-term survival.
The once-common butterflies may have a third of their summer breeding grounds in 20 years, according to the Center for Biological Diversity. The butterflies’ lost habitat is as large as Texas.
The once-common milkweed has fallen victim to changing farming practices. About 94 percent of soybeans and 89 percent of corn grown in the U.S. are genetically-engineered herbicide-resistant varieties, and nearly all are Roundup Ready, according to the USFWS.
“Glyphosate used in conjunction with Roundup Ready crops has nearly eliminated milkweed from cropland throughout the monarch’s vital Midwest breeding range,” according to the USFWS. Iowa cropland lost nearly 99 percent of its milkweed from 1999 to 2012, the Midwest 64 percent.
Cropland milkweed produces nearly four times as many monarchs as milkweed in other settings, according to the NFWS. The Midwest produced 88 percent fewer monarchs in 2012 than it did in 1999, according to research estimates.
Herbicide drift from cropland also can reduce flowering plants that provide nectar for adult butterflies.
Changes in climate and habitat loss in Mexico have also hurt monarch populations.
Black tagged 200 of her releases one year, but never heard back about any of them.
She wonders if she will still be able to tend the butterflies from her backyard if monarchs become protected as an endangered species.
With her questions unanswered, she has focused on the task at hand. Her children and grandchildren lead lives too busy to worry with raising butterflies.
“I do it for the monarchs,” Black said. “At one point I was afraid they were going to become extinct. I just enjoy it. It never ceases to amaze me when a butterfly pops out of a chrysalis. It’s something I’ll probably do until the day I die.”
Monarch migration
To follow the annual long-distance flight of the monarch visit Journey North (https://journeynorth.org/monarchs) or monarch Watch (https:// www.monarchwatch.org/).