Each year for Mother’s Day, flowers are the “gift of choice” for Moms since they represent such colorful beauty, fragrance and intricate designs.
Whether it is a vase of fresh cut flowers, an indoor arrangement or perennials for the outside garden, flowers help us express our heart-felt sentiment on Mother’s Day…
As we dream of our summer gardens, it’s time to consider adding some milkweeds. Milkweed flowers look like something from another planet: Sputnik-like bundles of little blossoms with curved prongs in pink, orange, purple and white.
At least five milkweed species connect Flagstaff to the annual migration of monarch butterflies up and down North America. In fact the Southwest Monarch Study pinpoints Flagstaff as a “monarch hotspot.”
The branches sagged from the weight of butterflies. Thousands upon thousands of them — orange, black, and white — carpeted the trees around us, and the sound of their fluttering wings echoed through the still forest.
My three kids were mesmerized. Over Christmas holidays, in early January, we hiked the mountains of central Mexico with Omar Vidal, CEO of the World Wildlife Fund in Mexico, to see the famous monarch butterflies.
A major global assessment of pollinators is raising concerns about the future of the planet’s food supply.
A U.N.-sponsored report drawing on about 3,000 scientific papers concludes that about 40 percent of invertebrate pollinator species (such as bees and butterflies) are facing extinction. Vertebrate pollinators (such as bats and birds) are somewhat better off by comparison — 16 percent are threatened with extinction, “with a trend towards more extinctions,” the researchers say.
On today’s Your Call, we’ll talk about the plight of the monarch butterfly. Every year, monarchs migrate thousands of miles from Canada to Mexico, but their numbers are rapidly dwindling.
Habitat destruction from logging in Mexico and the elimination of milkweed in the US have brought this species to a tipping point.
In a letter delivered to the White House on Monday, leading monarch scientists, farmers, and educators asked President Obama and the Secretaries of Agriculture and the Interior to direct five federal agencies, the Natural Resources Conservation Service, Fish and Wildlife Service, Forest Service, Farm Service Agency and Bureau of Land Management, to establish a monarch butterfly recovery initiative to restore habitat for this species on both public and private lands.
University of Arizona researchers are playing a leading role in an unprecedented effort to save America’s most iconic butterfly, the monarch.
Due to loss of habitat for milkweed – the sole food plant of the caterpillars – populations of this important pollinator have plummeted in recent years, leaving the monarch in dire straits.
Monarch numbers are declining; this decline is statistically significant (Brower et al. 2012) and readily apparent from data on the area occupied by monarchs on the overwintering roost in Mexico.
While we saw more monarchs during the summer of 2014 than we did last year or the year before, and will thus hopefully see more in Mexico this winter, it’s unlikely that the population will be anywhere near as large as it was a decade ago.
One of the hottest winters in history poses good news and bad news for migrating Monarch butterflies this season. The good news: warm weather and well-timed rains translate into a grand wildflower season with plenty of milkweed in South Texas.
The bad news: those same high temperatures in Mexico where the Monarchs overwinter mean that many butterflies have burned up much of their stored winter fats, creating a lack of fuel and extra stress for their journey north.
Bounding out of a silver Ford pickup into the single-digit wind-flogged flatness that is Iowa in December, Laura Jackson strode…
The City of St. Louis is launching a citywide initiative to help connect people and urban nature. The STL Milkweeds for Monarchs initiative goals are to increase monarch butterfly habitat and to help people experience the splendor of monarchs in neighborhood parks and spaces.
This initiative will advance a priority in the Mayor’s Sustainability Action Agenda: to foster an enhanced connection between people and urban natural resources.
Stephanie Spencer considers monarch butterflies a staple of classroom learning. As a first grade teacher, she brought monarchs into her classroom to illustrate required content on life cycles.
Years later she began teaching third grade, and monarchs became the focus of her unit on migration.
Today, President Obama, Mexican President Peña Nieto, and Canada’s Prime Minister Harper committed their nations to taking steps to protect the monarch butterfly migration across Canada, the United States, and Mexico.
Recent scientific evidence by World Wildlife Fund and Mexico’s National Commission…
In the U.S. alone, there are more than 17,000,000 acres along federal, state and county highways that can potentially…
Two environmental groups filed a notice of intent to sue the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service today over its failure to protect the monarch butterfly under the Endangered Species Act.
The Center for Biological Diversity and Center for Food Safety petitioned for the monarch’s protection in August 2014, following a more than 80 percent decline in the butterfly’s population over the past two decades. In December 2014 the agency issued an initial positive decision on the petition and launched an official review of the butterfly’s status.
In October, millions of monarch butterflies will make a long migration from Canada to Mexico, many stopping in Santa Cruz, Pacific Grove, and Big Sur along the way.
Millions of Monarch butterflies make the long journey from Canada to Mexico — many stopping in Pacific Grove ….