The missing monarchs

The local decline in monarch butterflies this year has been remarkable.  In a bad way, that is.  In contrast to the past few years, now there are almost none.

I've been growing milkweed and serving as a backyard nursery for wild migrating monarchs for the past several years.  This was one of 2013's newborns, a male.  You can see his busted cocoon under the fence rail he's clinging to.  Hard to believe that whole creature was stuffed inside that tiny capsule just moments before.  

For the past two years, I watched hordes of caterpillars devour everything I could throw at them in the way of their milkweed dietary staple. This is also a photo from April 2013.  

Late April 2014, and this particular milkweed plant hasn't even been touched by a caterpillar (the adult females recognize milkweed and lay their eggs directly on the plants).  I have three large pots of the stuff.  One was well chewed, the other barely, and this one not at all.  Last year, all three were eaten down to the stems.    

I've found only two cocoons so far this year, and one of them is attached haphazardly to the side of a planter and looked to be in substandard condition.  The one above looks healthy - I've noticed that cocoons attached beneath cedar fence rails result in a high rate of successful butterflies.

In contrast, by this time last year, I had at least a dozen cocoons (plus probably many more hidden away that I didn't manage to find).  

According to the folks who monitor the health of the monarch population, their current numbers have fallen to the lowest level ever measured.  A number of causes are postulated, mostly involving habitat loss.

There's no habitat loss in my back yard.  They don't call it milkWEED for nothing - it spreads and grows as a weed, with no cultivation required.  Last year I dug up a bunch of volunteer milkweeds that had seeded themselves randomly in my yard and distributed them among my neighbors, hoping that folks would plant a pot and provide additional food to the fluttery migrants.   

Milkweed is only half the battle, though.  Monarchs also need other types of plants to supply nectar, and flowering plants have been in short, late supply in North America due to the whole polar vortex thing that happened this winter.

Anyway, it's a conspiracy of weather and habitat circumstances that is apparently intensifying their decline, but ordinary suburbanites have the option of making a low-effort contribution to help offset those losses.

I used the term "backyard nursery" above, but in the accepted lingo of monarch enthusiasts, the term is "monarch waystation".  But you don't have to get as fancy as officially registering your site - you could just plant milkweed and flowering plants in your yard.  If you plant it, they will come.  For as long as they are not extinct, at least.

Sign photo courtesy of the Monarch Watch website. 

On that note, I'll leave you with a re-posted video of an emergence from that same fence in 2013.  It's ten minutes long but most of the action takes place in the first 2:20.  The other 8 minutes show how the critter expands its wings very rapidly after emerging.  It's an amazing process.

URL for mobile devices:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXjRzdZc9zI

Embed:

Monarch moment, part 2

The natural result of this...

From a Centerpointe Communicator post of about a month ago.  Except I think I initially called the sex wrong on this one... upon closer inspection it appears to have been a female because it lacks the characteristic small black patch of pheromonal scales on the hind wings that males have. 

...surprisingly, turns out to be this:

Monarch caterpillars.  Lots of 'em.

Before departing our humble abode, one or more of last month's monarch visitors laid eggs.  This is one of the reasons why I like to have abundant landscaping in my yard: it's not just nice to look at in a passive sense - all kinds of interesting stuff happens out there.  It's an entire story unfolding on a daily basis in a ridiculously-small suburban back yard and, of one gets off one's duff and actively starts looking around, a lot of that unfolding story becomes evident, and there's plenty of learning opportunity in it.  I didn't know that monarchs actually bred and reproduced this far south.  I thought they proceeded farther north on their annual migrations before doing that. 

I seemed to have had far more caterpillars than milkweed available to feed them, because they stripped the plant bare.  That raised the obvious question: should I have culled the herd, leaving more milkweed available to a smaller number of individuals, or should I have let nature take its course??  Knowing very little about the life cycle of monarchs, I decided on the latter.

As the milkweed plants were getting stripped bare (they'll grow back from the roots), and the caterpillars began abandoning the urn of milkweed, presumably looking for more of it elsewhere.

"Is there any good way down from this thing?!?!"

This guy got one of the last available leaves.

And this guy decided to eat his last leaf upside down.

My milkweed recently went to seed, so I plan to harvest these and try to get more plants started, to be ready for next year's migration.  Monarchs are the only species of butterfly to engage in long-distance, round-trip migration, as many bird species do.  Except the monarch's lifespan is not long enough for any single individual to make the entire trip.  It takes three or four generations to complete the cycle.  They apparently use the earth's magnetic field and the sun to navigate in ways that nobody really understands, and the instinct to migrate is genetically-encoded. 

Notice how this guy had a larger yellow head and some larger sucker feet than the other individuals.  I don't know why this is.  Was he a different sub-species, did these differences represent the beginning stages of metamorphosis, or did this represent something else entirely? 

As of this morning, all of the caterpillars have vacated the now-stripped milkweed and have gone about their mysterious ways in doing whatever comes next for them.  I don't know if any of them got enough nutrition to make it through their chrysalis stage.  I was kinda hoping to see a few cocoons hanging around our yard because they're really neat...

www.wikipedia.org
They start out looking like this...

www.wikipedia.org
...and then toward the end of the metamorphosis, you start seeing the butterfly forming within.

So perhaps if I get lucky, I'll find a coccoon or two somewhere in our yard in the next week or two (how far can caterpillars travel from a host plant before they have to hunker down for their change of life??).  And within a few more months, hopefully I'll have more milkweed.

A monarch moment

A few pretty pics here in celebration of yesterday's picture-perfect weather.  After the sixth wettest start-to-a-year on record, the sunshine and warm temps were a welcome relief.

If you were out and about the neighborhood yesterday (which you arguably should have been), you may have noticed that the monarch butterfly migration is underway.  These amazing creatures are the only species of butterfly that migrate in a style similar to birds, from Mexico to more northern latitudes, and back again in winter.

If you want to get pics like this, you have to be patient.  These are skittish creatures, but if you stand near their target destination (here, a bolted broccoli plant) for ten minutes or so, they will acclimate to your presence. 

Bee-cause we have one of the few landscaped back yards in Centerpointe Section 9, we tend to attract an extremely large quantity of these guys, which have few other local flowers to visit.  I noticed yesterday that the bees were harrassing the monarchs, trying to chase them away from the flowering plants.

And if you're patient long enough with your camera, you might get rewarded with a beauty shot such as this.  According to Wikipedia, this is a male monarch... 

...and he graced our backyard yesterday en route to points north.
(Monarch migration excerpt from Wikipedia.com)

Spring scenery

It's springtime and everyone is ga ga over gardening, even if they don't like gardening but instead just like the idea of gardening.  So I have to issue forth some new content on this theme, mostly in the form of pretty pictures, because that's what spring is all about.

We are again in a serious drought, but our nights have not been too obscenely warm.  For those reasons, I managed to cop a late-season broccoli last weekend, and I've got one more cauliflower that just might make it to maturity.  As I mentioned in previous posts, cruciferous vegetables are winter crops in the Houston area, not spring crops. 

Broccoli maketh healthy meals for teenagers.  So far we've had about eight person-servings from that one late-season bonus broccoli. 

There are two sure signs of spring in our back yard:  First, mourning doves nesting in one of our hanging baskets. 



What I've noticed is that they tend to raise two chicks at the start of the season, but just one chick on the second laying as summer approaches. 

 

And two, it wouldn't be spring unless we were raising Monarch butterflies, as we did last year.  Those milkweed starts I distributed to my neighbors... remember, besides looking pretty as potted plants, one of the primary purposes of those things is to sustain migrating Monarchs.  The caterpillars will strip the entire plants clean of leaves and flowers, but you can just trim them back and they'll regenerate quickly. 

We have an extraordinary number of Monarch caterpillars right now.  I almost wonder if there is a geographic memory that gets laid down in this species, like salmon returning to their birthplace to spawn. 

Some people are hunting Easter eggs today, but we are hunting Monarch cocoons.  We have two attached to our fence thus far, but most of these things are extremely difficult to locate.  The caterpillars slink off and cocoon in concealed locations most of the time. 

On the subject of milkweed, I resolved to expand our repertoire, so my daughter and I went to Maas Nursery yesterday to see what we could find, as we only have one variety in our yard right now. 

If you haven't been to Maas, you're missing out, big time.  It's extraordinary. 

As it happens, Maas did not have any milkweed in stock except for the cultivar we already grow.  A salesperson reported to me that they literally sell out of it faster than their grower can produce it.  But then we got into a discussion about Monarchs, and I got into the middle of a debate that two salespeople were having.  They'd located a caterpillar on a dill plant.  One thought it was a Monarch.  The other thought it was a swallow tail.  I was requested to pronounce on the matter.

It's a black swallowtail.  They love dill.  Monarchs cannot eat dill.  Monarchs cannot eat anything but milkweed, which is why their future is uncertain.   

I can safely say that in my 20+ years of going to Maas, that's the first time anyone asked me for advice on any gardening matter.  Most emphatically, it's usually the other way around. 

Anyway, I'll have more to say about spring gardening in a subsequent post, but it's now time for church.  I will close with a ladybug and a contented smile, because there's always room for both.

Cruising around some of my tomato volunteers. 

One of the cool mini-garden arrangements for sale in Maas Nursery.  He looks like the stone equivalent of a stoner. 

A great day to be born

The culmination of all my milkweed-growing and Monarch-watching becomes apparent in these special ten minutes.  Happy Saturday - it's a glorious one. 

Description from YouTube:
A Monarch is born during a spectacular sunny afternoon on April 20, 2013 in the Centerpointe neighborhood of League City, Texas. 

The video frame position does not change, so you can see just how fast the wings expand.  Rhythmic contractions of its abdomen are visible as fluid pumps from it to the wings.  By the end of this 10-minute sequence, the wings extend beyond the lower edge of the field of view. 

Raw video from a Nikon D3100.  The noises in the background are shutter clicks from another still camera. 
http://centerpointeleaguecity.blogspot.com/

Milkweed mystery

Some of you Centerpointe folk are receiving little gifts with tags stuck in your doors that look like this:

That's happening because I'm in the process of excavating volunteers from my yard.

I'll be re-mulching my wretched-looking weedy beds soon, but before I do, I need to remove all of the valuable volunteers, like this these milkweed starts.  Three years after we first began terraforming our back yard, a lot of stuff has become prolific, including these. 

I dug up this batch and went door to door, sometimes talking with folks, but some were not home and others I knew were putting small children to bed, so I did not knock.  I just left the plants on their front stoops with the tags wedged in their doors.   

This kind of milkweed grows quickly and will attract Monarch butterflies as soon as it gets to be a decent size.  I've blogged about our backyard Monarchs previously. 

The caterpillars feed on milkweed species exclusively.  We had a lot of fun last year watching them complete their life cycle.  This guy is about one hour old.

Two days ago, NYT published this piece describing how Monarch habitat is almost gone.  That was part of my inspiration for saving our current batch of volunteer plants. 

Milkweed is fairly easy to grow - just place in fertile soil and water frequently.  We keep ours in two large flower pots.

Once they get large, you have to prune them back or they'll look scruffy.  But they flower without encouragement.  I took this pic of the parent plant this evening.  It's been outside all winter - they also stand up well to cold weather.  If frost kills them, they often come back from the roots. 

Anyway, if you happen to receive one of these from me and don't have room for it, feel free to pass it to one of your neighbors. 

They don't take long to grow to a good size. 

I'm going to be distributing tomato starts in much the same way pretty soon.  Because I compost my own garden wastes, I end up with volunteer tomatoes everywhere in my yard.  Based on my past experience with them, they seem to be pretty productive in the second generation, so they're worth planting.  Or at least they have been, so far. 

What monarch butterflies teach us

Answer:  That each and every species is similarly characterized by a natural and unchangeable range in individual ability to thrive.

I bet you were assuming that I was going to say something along the lines of "that we should love and cherish Mother Earth and conserve her precious resources".  But that would be a shallow analysis, indeed.    

Ten days ago, I did not predict a good outcome for this particular caterpillar, who chose to attach her cocoon rather haphazardly to the side of this large planter.  It fell way short of an ideal location, exposed to both the weather and potential sources of physical damage (e.g., my running dog brushing up against the planter).  The individual in the cocoon surprised me by emerging in the visibly flawless condition shown above, but then failed to display physical vigor.  I could have easily reached out and grabbed her, as she seemed to lack a reasonable startle reaction.

This is what I've noticed most strikingly after a few years of fostering monarchs - an incredible diversity of competency when it comes to executing the basic functions of their life cycle.  They come from the same parents at the same time in the same environmental conditions with the same unlimited food source, and yet their individual outcomes are always wildly different.  Some of them do the most inexplicably boneheaded things (even though they don't have bones).  Sometimes as I am talking to them I ask, "Dude, what were you thinking?!  You can't possibly survive in your own self-selected conditions.  Why would you intentionally throw your own life away like that?!"

Of course, I have asked the same question verbatim of a number of people in my life, as human being show exactly the same diversity in competence when it comes to executing their life cycles.  It's all just a reflection of that most fundamental property of all life:  the DNA naturally produces a riot of possibilities, some of which will ultimately be selected for, and some of which will not, and there's nothing that anybody could (or should) do to change that. I suppose I just expected a narrower range in outcome possibilities in a much-less-complex organism such as a monarch butterfly.  But no.  This is how we all are, bones or no bones.  

He makes my latest butterfly look tame on the issue of self-preservation.  

Monarch magic

Following up on a few other Monarch-related posts, I came close to capturing the complete transformation of this guy (and he is a guy), who my daughter discovered over the weekend:

This is the same cocoon pic I posted the other day. 

As soon as you see the cocoon darkening, you know that the end is nigh.  For the cocoon stage, that is. 

For a couple of hours, I returned to inspect the situation about every twenty minutes.  I noticed the thing beginning to split open...

...but then I had to make a phone call, and he popped out and began expanding his wings too quickly for me to capture the intervening stages.  Would that real life would just stop for a while and I could just sit in the garden at my leisure in the middle of a work day. 

Onward and upward, leaving the old home behind.  Those two back dots you see embedded within the black stripe on his inner wings signify that he's a male. 



It's extremely tricky to witness the entire emergence.  They do it on their own time.  Nothing happens, nothing happens, and then when your back is turned, everything happens at once.  Sort of reminds me of baseball that way.

Happy Tuesday. 

Ode to an anole

They are often called "chameleons" by Houston homeowners who don't know that they are actually small iguanas. 

The Carolina anole readily changes color from green to brown and back again, hence the confusion relating to "chameleon".

This guy is eyeing a Monarch butterfly caterpillar, but them's not good eatin'.   

In the greater Houston area, we reportedly have two related species - the native Carolina anole and the invasive brown anole which tends to displace it at lower vegetative levels.  Maybe because most of my gardening is done in raised containers, I seem to have a preponderance of the natives in my yard.

Dude, you look like crap - there's just no other way to say it. 

Like other lizards, they shed their skin as they grow.  This guy was caught in the act. 

They are amazingly fast.  This is the same skin-shedder taking flight and photographed at a speed of 1/125 second, and the camera still can't touch him. 

According to what I've read, these two species can be distinguished in part by the fact that Carolinas can turn green and the browns can only vary themselves among different shades of brown.  But if you're examining one, chances are that it's frightened, and they tend to all go to brown when stressed, so that makes it a bit difficult to tell them apart.

Am I brown or am I a really a green guy who has simply turned brown for the moment?

Most of the time, they are far too skittish to allow themselves to be touched, but I've noticed that their territorial disputes tend to make them irrationally bold.  This guy was in the process of fighting with someone else when I took this pic, and he refused to cede his ground. 

A brown or a brown phase Carolina perched on the edge of one of my culvert gardens.   Dare anything with six legs attempt to gain access to this area. 

This is what's cool about anoles: They eat bugs.  Lots and lots of bugs.  They cruise around methodically all day long eating bugs, especially on vegetable plants, which disproportionately attract bugs.  I don't think I could even begin to garden organically in this area if I didn't have an army of anoles out there on patrol.  I don't have to pay them anything - they show up and do the bug control for free.  Because I garden and landscape so intensively, and because Carolinas like to be up off the ground, my corresponding anole density is impressive.  At any time during the day, I can go to a vegetable stock tank and find at least a few anoles in it, enthusiastically engaged in their lizardly work. 

They're fun to watch with their leaping and color-shifting and territorial antics, and they're photogenic, too.  Count yourself lucky if your yard is home to a healthy population of them. 

Assassin bug

If you see some of these in your garden or landscaping, do not squash, spray, or otherwise kill them.

It's one type of "assassin bug", which preys on other insects and which can help prevent landscape damage.  They patrol all day long, like an insect version of a police force. 

That particular species of beneficial insect is known as a "milkweed assassin bug", but I see them all over our yard, not just on the milkweed plants. 

Milkweed.  I wonder if the bugs attained their bright orange color for the purposes of camouflage. 

They eat stink bugs and aphids, among many other pests.  The Texas state insect is actually the Monarch butterfly, but anything that eats stink bugs (native or invasive) is a close runner up in my book. 

If you look closely, you'll see a long proboscis tucked under the front of its body.  That's the deadly apparatus that siphons the guts out of other bugs.  Yummy.