Friends of the Monarchs

Couple is helping support, grow the butterfly population

By Larry Magrath

The recognizable and distinctive-looking orange and black Monarch butterfly perched briefly on Brian Nott’s finger. Outside protected confines for the first time, it stretched its wings to full width, retracted and stretched out a couple more times before taking off. As brief as it was, it was a familiar, yet subtle, thank you and goodbye.

That particular Monarch was a male and a minute later a female Monarch repeated the gratitude as Nott reached into a mesh cage to retrieve each of them. Both were less than 24 hours old and had Nott to thank for passing into adulthood protected from predators and environmental toxins that claim most of their brethren.

The protected home was a small shed on the rural Morgan property where Brian and Jayne Nott hatch and eventually release 80 or so Monarchs each growing season. They’ve learned a lot about the process in five years. Each spring they start over again by searching milkweed leaves on their property and in road ditches to find those tiny eggs laid exclusively on a milkweed leaf.

“Without milkweed they cannot survive,” Brian said.

The fascination with Monarch butterflies started some years ago when the couple watched a PBS documentary on the life cycle of the delicate pollinators that migrate from as far north as Canada south into Mexico.

“How do they know to do that?” he wondered.

Jayne said she is equally intrigued by the Monarchs.

“It’s just amazing I think to watch how it all evolves, how they come from this little egg to chrysalis and then turning into butterflies,” she said. “It’s pretty cool.”

They keep the egg-laden leaves in small plastic containers in the shed and see them hatch into instars, tiny caterpillars. They grow up quickly eating away at the freshly delivered milkweed. They get bunched with others the same size and continue growing in their small-container worlds. Eventually the caterpillars end up in the two-by-two mesh cages, attach themselves to the roof, form into pupates, then chrysalis and then emerge as a butterfly ready to complete their life’s mission.

Nott said a trained eye can sometimes tell which ones are the fourth generation that will migrate thousands of miles away, escaping the mercury drop in the fall. The migrators tend to be bigger and stronger. Researchers have had success tagging Monarchs in an effort to see where they go.

“They got people that actually tagged a bunch of Monarchs and went down to where they go over winter in Mexico. They actually found one of them that was tagged at a university somewhere. So they figured out where they actually go during the winter because nobody was really sure when they started investigating Monarchs way back when,” Brian said.

Since milkweed is essential to their survival, he offers seeds for people to grow their own and encourages people to plant pollinator plots. Pollinator plots serve as waystations for the Monarchs on their migration routes as well as other essential insects.

Farmers and maintenance workers mowing ditches are often agreeable to leaving milkweed patches once they appreciate the biome’s symbiosis. The milkweed is the sole food source for the Monarch butterfly and grows fairly tall, so it’s often mowed down to spruce up a road ditch or improve motorists site lines. When damaged, the plant emits a milky substance containing cardiac glycosides. Most species of milkweed are toxic to humans and many other species.

“Some of these that are hatching now might be the fourth generation. They are the ones that are called the hybrid that migrate down there. The first, second, and third generation, they only live for up to a month or four to six weeks and they lay eggs and then they die. The fourth generation Monarchs are the only ones that live about eight or nine months, and they migrate down to Mexico, about 3,000 miles. Then in the spring they’ll wake up out of hibernation or whatever they do down there, and they start their journey back. The fourth generation will die off and then the whole cycle starts over again.”

Besides the milkweed patches on his rural property, he scours the road ditch patches even after mowers have done their work. He’s found them on bits and parts of plants and even on the small, more tender plants closer to the ground. The Monarchs need all the help they can get as the survival rate in the wild is only about 10 percent.

Everyone can help and the process is easy enough and fun to complete. He encourages people to do their homework and learn as they go to get started.

Online resources include Monarchjointventure.org and Monarchwatch.org. Anyone can help in the tagging effort by signing up on these sites, he said.

“While hunting for eggs in a road ditch, I once found nine eggs on one plant,” he said. “Raising them can be a fun and rewarding hobby. Together we can save the milkweed to save the Monarch.”