Bug lovers heed the butterfly’s scream
Snail darters are ugly, spotted owls are hard to spot, but no one has anything bad to say about butterflies, which helps explain why nearly 100 environmentalists, farmers, academics and others gathered last Friday in Springfield to talk about saving the monarch butterfly.
The so-called butterfly summit at the state Department of Natural Resources came two years after environmentalists petitioned the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to list the monarch butterfly as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. The government expects to decide by 2019 whether the butterfly warrants protection under the law, but officials aren’t waiting to combat a steep decline in butterfly populations.
“It’s one of the most exciting conservation movements that this country is ever going to see,” Kraig McPeek, field supervisor with the U.S. Fish And Wildlife Service, told summit participants last week.
Illinois, one of seven states that has adopted the monarch butterfly as the official state insect, is smack in the middle of efforts to ensure that monarch butterflies don’t disappear.
Twenty years ago, experts estimated that more than a billion monarch butterflies populated the earth, basing the estimate on how many acres of remote Mexican forest were covered by butterflies during winter months. The forest retreat of the monarch, where every living monarch migrates each winter, was consumed by 45 acres of butterflies 20 years ago, with tree limbs sagging under their weight. In 2013, fewer than two acres were inundated by an estimated 35 million butterflies.
Numbers have been increasing – last winter, 10 acres of forest were covered with butterflies. But conservationists say that everyone, from full-time farmers to backyard gardeners to park districts to public works departments, needs to change their ways.
Agriculture in the Midwest is largely to blame for the monarch’s decline, experts say. Herbicide-resistant crops have allowed farmers to spray fields with chemicals that kill milkweed, the plant on which butterflies lay eggs and the only plant that monarch caterpillars will eat. But it’s not just farmers. Such seemingly innocuous stuff such as mowing alongside roads at the wrong time can kill milkweed-munching caterpillars or deprive butterflies of weeds on which to lay eggs.
The key to the butterflies’ survival here sounds simple: Grow milkweed. The good news is, milkweed grows like, well, a weed, so once a few plants get going, Mother Nature can do the rest. But convincing folks that weeds are good can be a tough sell.
During last week’s summit, one farmer who obtained milkweed seed from Pheasants Forever, which is pushing efforts to revive the species, said that he wanted signs that declared the areas that he had planted with milkweed was pheasant habitat.
“I didn’t want everyone to think I’d lost it, that I was some crazy farmer,” the man told a group of attendees who were discussing what agricultural interests can do to help the butterfly.
That shortages of milkweed seed, which is sold online and given away by conservation groups, were reported last year is a sign that monarchs are much loved. And not just in rural areas.
The Rev. Debra Williams, outreach coordinator for Faith In Place who came from Chicago to attend the summit, said that her group uses the monarch butterfly to illustrate the process of transformation.
“The monarch butterfly is a powerful image,” said Williams, who sees opportunities in urban areas to plant milkweed in community gardens.
Airports and fairgrounds are excellent places to grow milkweed, so managers of such land need to mow with care, according to summit attendees. There are plans afoot for signs to designate butterfly habitat and build awareness of the monarch’s plight.
The mass effort to save the monarch is new enough that there isn’t yet a system to keep track of how much milkweed has been planted and where.
“The science is trying to keep up with what we’re trying to do,” Carol Hays, executive director of Prairie Rivers Network, told summit attendees.
Farmers are willing to do their part, said Steve Stierwalt, president of the Association of Illinois Soil and Water Conservation Districts, but butterfly conservation programs aren’t well known in farming country. It is at least hypothetically possible that access to herbicides could be restricted if monarch butterflies are listed as a threatened or endangered species, but Stierwalt said he believes the issue can be solved by tweaking agricultural methods as opposed to overhauling them.
McPeek agreed. “We are not talking about wholesale changes in agricultural practices,” McPeek said.
Stierwalt said that on his own farm he has stopped mowing so-called filter strips of uncultivated land that separates bodies of water from crops.
“The milkweed needs a publicist,” Stierwalt quipped. “We always thought of it as a weed. I plowed a lot of it under when I was a kid. I’m reformed.”
Contact Bruce Rushton at [email protected].
