March 28, 2024

American Monarch

Posted on April 1, 2015 by in Yard 'N Garden

Back when I began my Backyard Wildlife Habitat, I had a wide variety of creatures I took for granted. The Sulphur butterflies would color the place yellow, and I saw Skippers and huge Swallowtails and Wood Nymphs fairly often. A friend gave me a butterfly book to help identify these denizens.

Slowly I developed the Habitat to encourage butterflies. There’s a butterfly bush (Buddleia) in the front, as well as some beautiful Butterfly Weed (Asclepias), and numerous ordinary milkweeds at the back. By now I have a good variety of native plants such as Trillium, Redbud trees, and so on.  But in spite of it all, the butterflies have diminished.Apr2015MonarchButterflyW

American Monarchs are in trouble (perhaps they heard we are a Republic?) — so much so that a monarch-counting website has been established in California. As we increasingly take land for our cities and developments, the habitat of our pollinators declines. As we rid ourselves of pests with insecticides, we kill off our useful insects too.

That’s where gardeners come in. We can plant milkweeds (there are many interesting varietals) to help monarchs find host plants for their larvae.We can stop using deadly insecticides that kill our monarchs. Beware of feeding the birds in summer: they eat butterflies too! (But do help the birds out in the cold weather!)

The National Wildlife Federation has a beautiful account of the lifecycle of the monarch: how they work their way down to Mexico for their summer, and back again for ours. It is surely a remarkable journey, utterly dependent on abundance of certain plants. I suspect my little Wildlife Habitat is suffering because there is little support around it. The monarchs can hardly find their way to my yard if there aren’t enough butterfly gardens along their route.

Fortunately a growing nationwide movement (no pun intended) is helping to reestablish the monarchs, and I hope you will consider joining it. The Xerces Society in California is organized to protect pollinators and offers a great deal of information on the subject. They have published a popular book, Attracting Native Pollinators, as well as pollinator habitat signs (one of these in your front garden creates a lot of interest and excitement). The group also has numerous articles on butterfly gardening, milkweeds (http://www.xerces.org/milkweed/) and even a milkweed seed finder (http://www.xerces.org/milkweed-seed-finder/).

The Ladybird Johnson Wildflower Center also has a section on butterflies and moths (www.wildflower.org/collections/collection.php?collection=bamona).

Be sure to check out this site too – you’ll love it! (http://blog.nwf.org/2014/09/a-visual-journey-through-the-monarch-life-cycle).

It’s a good feeling, when you know that you are helping.

Lynette Morse , a Master Gardener in the Capital City Master Gardener Association, lives in Montgomery. For info on becoming a Master Gardener, visit www.capcitymga.org or email capcitymga@gmail.com.

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