Saving the Migration – A Newsy Documentary

Monarch butterflies have made a big comeback in their wintering grounds in Mexico, after suffering serious declines, experts said Friday.

The area covered by the orange-and-black insects in the mountains west of Mexico City this season was more than three and a half times greater than last winter. The butterflies clump so densely in the pine and fir forests they are counted by the area they cover rather than by individual insects.

Habitat loss on breeding grounds in the United States — not on wintering grounds in Mexico — is the main cause of recent and projected population declines of migratory monarch butterflies in eastern North America, according to new research.

Milkweed is the only group of plants that monarch caterpillars feed upon before they develop into butterflies. Industrial farming contributed to a 21-per-cent decline in milkweed plants between 1995 and 2013, and much of this loss occurred in the central breeding region.

There is growing evidence that many pollinators and plants are being triggered into earlier but not necessarily synchronous activity by the same temperature shifts associated with global warming. Find out what strategies you can implement in your own garden, orchard, or farm to enhance your plant pollinator habitat.

With climatic uncertainty now “the new normal,” many farmers, gardeners, and orchardists in North America are desperately seeking ways to adapt how they grow food in the face of climate change…

Los tres niveles de gobierno, instituciones académicas, de investigación y sociedad civil, se comprometieron a unir esfuerzos tendientes a proteger el fenómeno de la Mariposa Monarca y a pugnar porque aumente el número de lepidópteros que año con año llega a los santuarios de Michoacán y del Estado de México.

Al inaugurarse el Segundo Encuentro Internacional de Investigación y Conservación de la Mariposa Monarca, el Comisionado Nacional de Áreas Naturales Protegidas, Luis Fueyo…

I would like to expand upon Dennis Keeney’s fine column of Sept. 21 on the plight of the monarch butterfly.

I have worked on these butterflies for 15 years, and Mr. Keeney cites my research in his article. He notes that the population crashed in 2012 and 2013 because of bad weather, but by that time, the population had already declined by 65 percent since 1999.

Our data show that this decline was primarily due to the loss of milkweeds in the Midwest, the primary breeding area for monarchs.

Download and print your own free Make Way for Monarchs poster. It’s designed to print for about a dollar at any quick printer, like Kinkos or OfficeMax, using a laser printer.

The image is 12 x 18 inches…

“This changes everything”–the line that Donald Trump stole from Naomi Klein (who referred to climate change, not emails) can only be authentically used in relation to one amazing news story this week: The front page Sunday NY Times article by Danny Hakim “Doubts About a Promised Bounty: Genetically Modified Crops Have Failed to Lift Yields and Ease Pesticide Use.”

As organic fruit farmers, John and I are very appreciative of our farming partners, the native pollinators and honey bees that do extensive work on our farm. We have tried to develop the farm as a holistic ecosystem and take seriously the charge of being stewards of the land during our tenure here.

About seven years ago, we noticed a decline in bumble bee and other native bee populations.

One afternoon last March, on a small vegetable farm that Paul Kaiser runs in a particularly chilly valley in Sebastopol, California, a group of agriculture specialists gathered around a four-foot steel pole.

The experts had come to test the depth and quality of Kaiser’s top-soil, and one of them, a veteran farmer from the Central Valley named Tom Willey, leaned on the pole to push it into the dirt as far as he could.

A couple of weeks ago, it was raining monarch butterflies. I was visiting a hilltop sanctuary near Mexico City where monarchs from Canada and the U.S. Midwest spend their winters.

The tiny critters cling to branches in clusters so dense they bend the bows of massive fir trees.

On a Friday evening in January, a thousand people at the annual California Native Plant Society conference in San Jose settled down to a banquet and a keynote speech delivered by an environmental historian named Jared Farmer.

His chosen topic was the eucalyptus tree and its role in California’s ecology and history. The address did not go well. Eucalyptus is not a native plant but a Victorian import from Australia. In the eyes of those gathered at the San Jose DoubleTree, it qualified as “invasive,” “exotic,” “alien” — all dirty words to this crowd…

Sigue la ruta que la Mariposa Monarca debe recorrer, desde el norte del continente americano, para llegar a nuestro país, a sus santuarios ubicados en los bosques altos de Michoacán y el Estado de México.

La vida de la mariposa monarca comienza en una planta llamada asclepia, donde los huevecillos son depositados. La historia de la mariposa monarca continúa después de 4 a 12 días, cuando emerge una oruga que se alimenta de la misma planta en la que nació y sobre la que se desarrolla hasta convertirse en un fuerte adulto alado.

Make Way for Monarchs’ endorsement of the Moral Action on Climate Rally in September began with an idea to promote monarch conservation and to share locally native milkweed seed with the larger community to & raise the level of awareness on habitat of pollinators.

We initially hoped parents attending the Moral Action on Climate Rally on 9/24 on the National Mall would allow their young kids to dress up as little “pollinators” – honeybees, butterflies, dragonflies and bats…

Gary Nabhan and I are bumping along in a rental car down a two-track dirt road that follows the edge of Sonoita Creek’s floodplain, some 29 kilometers north of the Arizona–Mexico border.

Nabhan—an ethnobiologist, conservation biologist and agroecologist at the University of Arizona and author of more than 30 books on food, farming and nature—tells me how extraordinary this borderlands region is for pollinators: native bees, butterflies, hummingbirds, even nectar-feeding bats. And now he is giving me a tour to illustrate his point.

How is the decline of monarch butterflies and its relation to the management of corn seen from south of the Mexican border with the U.S.? Recently, we went to the cradle of origin of maize in Oaxaca not to do our own research, but to simply listen to Mexican researchers, farmers, artists and chefs.

Because both the monarch and maize have been iconic symbols of life in Mesoamerica for millennia, we wanted to hear how Mexicans perceived issues surrounding their conservation from scientific, cultural and political perspectives.