Endangered

I heard this morning that the monarch butterfly has been placed on the endangered species list.

There has been talk about that possibility for the last few years as the population of this North American treasure has plummeted. Each summer, as I watch the butterflies around my own garden, the radio informs us about another fire, another drought, or how another bit of Michoacan forest has disappeared. Outside my kitchen window this hot July day, the monarchs “court and spark” –wink wink, and our apologies to Joni Mitchell—and they care not a whit about what it says in the New York Times about their numbers or their prospects.

Those number are bleak. West of the Rockies the monarch butterfly is, if you go by the arithmetic in the newspapers, almost gone.

There is milkweed in my yard, and the butterflies have arrived as they do each year from whichever mainland terminal they depart to cross the water. They chase each other around in twos and threes, like the adolescents they might well be. They lay an egg here, an egg there, and with any luck the milkweed patch will soon be nibbled and chomped by striped monarch caterpillars who eat and grow and do nothing else, and whose primary worry is some approaching child with an empty jar. When the time comes to make their chrysalis, the fat caterpillars who grow up in my neighborhood generally abandon the milkweed patch and find a sturdier berth, attaching to the underside of a picnic table, or to a stepladder or a wheelbarrow, which is not very smart. There they hang, gold-speckled and hopeful in their tidy little neon-green pup tent, until someday out pops a rather helpless and disoriented orange butterfly. The newly metamorphosed flyer will stagger around all disheveled like somebody who slept all night on the bus from Chicago. It will get its bearings soon enough, find some sun and dry out, plump up its wings and take flight, fresh and new and thinking--if it thinks at all--of Mexico.

We used to take the seasonal influx of monarch butterflies for granted. They were just one of the nice things we had around here, like apple blossoms and lupines and the moons of Jupiter, like crabmeat and Christmas trees, like the indigo bunting and the snow owl and the bald eagle.

Hold on: maybe quite a lot like the bald eagle. Does anybody remember DDT? There was a time when we thought it a big deal to spot an eagle. We–maybe not you, maybe not me, but “we” in some general sense—were decimating the eagle population through the use of a mosquito-killer thought to be harmless or at least worth it. The stuff made birds’ eggs too thin and fragile to shelter a chick to hatching, and scowly-eyed ol’ Sam the Eagle became increasingly rare.

Milkweed is a strange flower, fragrant enough but large and only marginally ornamental, and unless you are encouraging monarch caterpillars it might seem a bit in the way. That, evidently, is the consensus of large-scale agribusiness in the middle of the continent, which clears it aside for the soybeans and whatever else with a generous application of Roundup. The thing is, if you are fluttering from Mexico to Maine you are likely to require more than one season, and an Iowa caterpillar still needs to eat. They do not eat. Their truck-stop has closed, and that is only one of the problems which has beset the monarchs.

The well-meaning among us can cultivate all the milkweed we like in our little New England dooryards but unless the massive fields of commodity product, the industry of plants as raw material some call “farming,” the soy and corn as biochemical basis for industry and subsidy and mass-production food –-unless that massive complex is convinced to bend, and to let some of the milkweed grow, that trip is just too long.

The cross-country road-trip is an icon in our culture, a cherished image, something we all muse about when high school is boring or the small town seems monochrome. This little orange aviator might be seen as a symbol of one of America’s favorite ideas. It is about Steinbeck and Kerouac and Lewis and Clark, about Route 66 and the Oregon Trail, and the kids in the back seat bickering on the way to Yellowstone. It’s, “If you’re goin’ to San Francisco,” and trucks and trains and every song about going down to Mexico ever sung in some local dialect. The monarch could easily be an American symbol, just like the bald eagle is an American symbol, and as such we might ought put a little more effort into its protection.

Hey; we did it for the eagle. Those birds are everywhere out here now.

Published in the Rockland, Maine Free Press, July, 2022.