Queen of monarchs nurtures caterpillars
Bucks County nature lover raises butterflies in her house, yard
The monarch butterfly bobbing and weaving around the milkweed at Cindy Mench’s house settled on a leaf now and again and tucked her tail underneath, leaving behind a pale, barely visible dot.
An egg. The monarch would lay up to 400 before dying in two weeks or so, said Mench, adding a bit of “Charlotte’s Web” melancholy to the mesmerizing turning of the life cycle in her yard. Of those hundreds of eggs, only a handful, perhaps six or eight, will ever graduate to adulthood.
Parasites and predators kill the rest. But in Mench, the monarchs of Richland Township, outside Quakertown, have a quiet hero. The retired hairdresser takes the eggs into her
house and tends them from the moment they hatch into voracious larvae to the moment they bust out of a chrysalis and unfold their vivid orange-and-black wings.
Then she returns them to the outdoors, placing them among the milkweeds or, if the weather is threatening, under a Japanese cherry tree where they can shelter until the sun returns. Once she put 24 of them in the cherry branches and felt like she was standing under a Christmas tree decorated, as she put it, “by nature’s ornaments.”
“Who gets to do that?” she said. “It just never happens.”
Mench’s butterfly rearing is more than a hobby.
The population of monarchs has been plummeting for decades, because they have steadily lost habitat to development and forest-clearing across their migratory path between Canada and Mexico.
Conservation groups have petitioned to have them protected under the federal Endangered Species Act, a decision expected next year from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
In maintaining her monarch nursery, Mench is pushing back against a slow-motion natural disaster.
“I don’t want to live to see them go extinct,” she said. “I really hope people start paying attention.”
Much of the monarch’s life is lived in miniature. In the first larval stage, they are smaller than sesame seeds. Mench calls them “itty-bitties.” They grow like the Grinch’s heart, molting into ever-larger caterpillars that develop narrow colored stripes. Then they attach themselves to a surface and molt a final time into a chrysalis, which looks like an elongated green berry with a tiara-like band of gold dots around the top.
With blink-and-miss-it speed, they burst out of the chrysalis and unfold like blossoms. After a period of drying out and preening, they are ready to fly.
The whole process takes about two weeks. In nature, it happens among milkweeds, which monarchs use exclusively as their host. In Mench’s nursery, it happens mainly in the monarch room, a spare bedroom outfitted with screened bins full of leaves and branches made of sticks anchored in foam bases.
Since taking on the task over a year ago, Mench has released more than 200 monarchs into the suburban wilds. They spend their time around the patches of milkweed in her yard and in another across South Bethlehem Pike. Her heart skips a beat every time she watches one fly across that busy road, but they seem to have an instinct that keeps them from colliding with cars.
“Her enthusiasm is amazing,” said Becky Hess, a longtime friend who marveled at Mench’s transformation into Bucks County’s butterfly queen. “This woman is passionate about these butterflies. It’s phenomenal how she’s doing this.”
Mench fits her butterfly work in among many other labors. She volunteers to help the homeless — people and animals — and tends her big, intricately landscaped yard, which is spangled with bright flowers and shaded by trees and tall, broad-leafed plants.
Her husband, Mark, “thinks I’m crazy,” she said. “But he knew that when he married me.”
Even in Mench’s friendly environs, the monarchs face challenges and threats. Her milkweed is afflicted with aphids, but she can’t use insecticide because it will kill the butterflies.
“Please don’t lay an egg on that, sweetheart,” she cooed to a monarch as it settled on a moldy-looking leaf.
Some of the butterflies become infected with parasites. Others never quite emerge from the chrysalis. Outside, hornets attack them. So do praying mantises, which, gruesomely, eat the bodies but leave the wings behind.
Circle of life, Mench said, lamenting the loss of every butterfly but imagining a future where they color the skies again.