Pollinator Giving Trees – a fun hands-on project to learn about pollinators

Every year a generation of monarchs reach the forests of Mexico’s Michoacan region. The 2,800-mile journey south from the U.S. takes four generations of monarchs in a single year.

Millions of the butterflies turn the forest orange as they wait out the winter for six to eight months.

Mexico’s monarch butterflies are suffering from an usual cold weather system that began two days ago with severe rain, wind, and cold temperatures battering butterflies to the ground.

As snow falls in the Monarch Biosphere, conservation of the other end of the monarchs’ life is criticized as inadequate. U.S. conservation groups today issued a suit against the government for failing to protect the monarchs under the Endangered Species Act.

Two years ago migrating monarch butterflies transformed the lush gardens of Cape May Point into a series of “giant orange snowglobes.” That’s how Mark Garland of the Monarch Monitoring Project describes the good monarch days, the kind of days when thousands fly overhead.

There’s been no such spectacle yet this year, but Garland and members of the project’s team, who take a census of the monarchs three times a day, are holding out hope. The popular orange-and-black insects will be drifting toward this peninsula for a few more weeks to fill up on nectar before riding the winds that will hoist them over the Delaware Bay and on toward Mexico.

Everybody loves monarch butterflies. Author Anurag Agrawal refers to them as “the Bambi of the insect world.”

They are specifically bred to be released at weddings; their image has been pressed into service as the symbol of environmental organizations like the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Non-GMO project.

On March 9th 2016, just days after we’d heard the good news that monarch numbers had rebounded to cover just over 4 hectares of forest in the mountains of central Mexico; a huge winter storm hit their wintering sites and the surrounding area.

The storm began with rain and was followed by hail, snow, and sub-freezing temperatures. The freezing temperatures killed many monarchs and the strong winds caused trees to topple over, losing monarch habitat.

Nearly every autumn, I head to the hills to band and release hawks, eagles and other powerful raptors as they ride the mountains’ updraft on their southern migration. While there, I always used to marvel at another autumnal migrant, tiny but no less magnificent — monarch butterflies, flapping earnestly on their delicate wings, dappling the ridge top orange and black.

Although they weigh less than a tenth-of-an-ounce, the monarchs’ 2,500-mile annual transcontinental journey to Mexico is longer than that of most raptors. They fly north from Mexico across the Midwest and up the eastern seaboard, to Canada — and back again, all in one summer. The yearly trek requires several generations.

In a landmark meeting in the history of insect conservation, the White House today convened diverse stakeholders to address catastrophic declines in pollinators and prioritize their recovery on a continent-wide scale. Led by White House Science Policy Advisor, Dr. John Holdren, more than fifty farmers, beekeepers, nurserymen, scientists, educators…

If you read the headline “Gardeners’ Good Intentions Are Killing Monarch Butterflies,” you might get the impression that planting milkweed is bad for these butterflies. Well, don’t believe the hype. Monarchs need milkweed—in fact, it’s the only thing their larvae eat!

In the interest of combating that disinformation, dubbed #MonarchGate, which kicked off in the media two weeks ago, I’m going to make a few more things clear. In a hurry?

In a new study, Monarch Watch Director Chip Taylor and colleagues have shown that speculation regarding the declining monarch population, despite having received much attention, is unsupported.

Many Americans were startled to learn recently that a butterfly once found in so many people’s backyards and fields is now being petitioned for federal listing as a threatened species. It will take months if not years for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to decide whether the monarchs require this form of protection.

Rather than advocating for a particular outcome, I wish to focus on how any effective protection will need to positively engage both farmers and the rest of the food supply chain.

According to several widely-cited refereed journal articles, monarch butterfly populations may have declined precipitously over the last decade due to a number of man-made and natural factors…

dramatic reduction in milkweed densities on a hundred million or more acres of row crop farmlands due to intensified glyphosate use in weed management practices…

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.

It was a snowy March day in 1995, and I had just purchased a house in an old St. Paul neighborhood. As I surveyed the back yard, which had been occupied by two large dogs all winter, I tried to imagine how I could convert the torn-up turf grass into the kind of yard that people and wildlife would want to visit.

It was a stretch to picture a new landscape, but I was determined to try. With my background as a plant ecologist and gardener, the yard project felt like my kind of challenge.

It has been said that for any “movement” to succeed, a moving theme song is needed. That may be true.

Bob Dylan’s “The Times, They are a-changing” and “Blowing in the Wind”; Pete Seeger’s “We Shall Overcome” and “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” and Peter, Paul and Mary’s “If I Had a Hammer” are but a tiny sample of the soul-moving tunes that come to mind when thinking of the 1960s civil rights movement.

As Mexico emerges from the most violent election campaign within living memory and embarks on the presidency of Andres López Obrador, one prominent citizen watches at a diagonal: a veteran of Mexico’s other war – not that over narco-traffic and its clients in politics, but that against nature.

In a recent interview with the daily El Universal, Homero Aridjis – award-winning poet and former ambassador – described all the candidates at last June’s election as “environmental illiterates” – referring to the battle he has fought for decades now, and which he sees reaching its final stages – for Mexico’s natural and cultural heritage.