It’s said that each year monarch butterflies fly as far north as southern Canada. I’m just happy that some made it to Michigan…
Not one to complain too much about summertime heat, I have to admit that the humid doldrums that set in over us for most of the last month-and-a-half has had me down a little. For that reason alone, I was optimistic last week that my funk would be blown away by a fresh Lake Michigan breeze.
Mike Lunsford
As if I have to remind anyone, it has been gray and wet and hot lately, our sunsets relegated to a smudgy red orb in a smoky western sky reminiscent of a “Twilight Zone” episode. An obsession with having a neat yard has had me in constant high gear this summer with its endless weed pulling, mower deck scraping, and grass raking. My sweat-soaked work clothes and full rain gauge have led to a “Groundhog Day” kind of routine, but I tried to forget all of that on our trip, which took us about five hours north.
As usual, it didn’t take long for me to get into a sandy beach chair, a paperback book in my hands, and a short stack of crossword puzzles nearby in case the plot proved watery. But that first day on the lake was disappointingly similar to what we’d experienced at home: a hazy mugginess, unrelieved by just a breath of hot wind. The Great Lake was glassy and sullen, and the thin strip of beach on which I sat already overcrowded, so I spent a comparatively short time there, heading instead to a shady bench above the sand, my face already a bit charred by a sneaky-hot sun.
The second spot I found was hardly better. I could smell only suntan lotion and mosquito spray in what little air came my way, and it seemed as though a sort of restlessness had those coming and going to the beach in a clamorous mood, the street behind me noisy with radios and leaf blowers and smudged by a fog of motorcycle and ATV exhaust. I began to wonder if staying home had been the better option.
And then, I saw my first monarch butterfly. It floated over my head like an orange kite, occasionally flapping its wings as it coasted to a stand of Queen Anne’s Lace and common milkweed that grew in abundance in a brushy strip between where I sat and the beach below. It was soon joined by a half-dozen more, a few cabbage whites and orange sulfurs and fat dragonflies mingling with them. They were oblivious to the chaos that was bothering me.
By October or so we won’t see monarchs in the Midwest; those that survive wing-nipping birds, car traffic, brush hogs, and their own natural mortality will be gone to the mountainous conifer forests of Michoacan, Mexico. Millions of them nearly blot out the sun of the nearly 140,000-acre Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve there, which serves as proof that government and science can sometimes work together to preserve the beauty we all need to see and better understand.
Although the butterflies have been the subjects of years of study, we still aren’t exactly sure how they even find their way back to the firs and pines and junipers of the sanctuary. Why they go there is more understood, for a recent piece in “Smithsonian” magazine quotes conservation biologist Alfonso Alonso as saying, “The area has the microclimate the monarchs need to slowly consume their stored fat and stay alive.” Their light-sensitive “sun compass[es]” and “internal clock[s]” keeps them on course.
Thankfully, we have been seeing more monarchs at home than we used to. My wife and I have worked a bit to get milkweed—their lifeblood—growing in the few sunny spots we have in our yard, and we’ve encouraged our farmer friends to leave stands of it alone in areas they normally mow. Late last summer I saw more monarch caterpillars than I have ever seen, and already this year we have witnessed dozens of monarchs flitting between our coneflowers and geraniums and lilies.
Milkweed, which is now blooming, serves several purposes for monarchs. Not only do they lay their eggs on the plants, they feed on its sticky nectar, which actually supplies them with a toxin that makes them taste bad to their predators. Unfortunately for us, my attempt to grow swamp milkweed—also a preferred monarch delicacy—from six starts my brother-in-law gave to me proved short-lived, for I walked out to the flower bed where I planted it a few weeks ago just in time to see a rabbit eat the very last bit of it. I’ll try again next year.
The news for monarchs, of course, isn’t all optimistic. Despite having what appears to be better numbers now than in recent years, their habitats in both Mexico and the United States continue to shrink. Overwintering sites—like the sanctuary—are being devoured by loggers and other competing ventures. Only human intervention has helped in the past few years, and only it can prevent monarchs from ceasing to be.
The longer we stayed near the beach, the better our short vacation got. The crowds thinned as a new week began, and by our third day a freshening breeze blew out across the lake to cool our faces and fill the sails of those who needed it. The languid stupor of the water changed to white-capped greens and blues, and on our final evening there the haze we’d seen hanging on the horizon had mostly moved on.
Before we left for home, with hopes that our skies had cleared as well, I turned again to that ridge above the beach, and in the sun I could see amid the locust and sumac and beach peas a few monarchs going about their business. I wish them well.
You can contact Mike Lunsford at hickory913@gmail.com; his website is at www.mikelunsford.com. Mike’s books can be bought in many local stores; they are also available at Amazon.com.