I’m at a bit of a pause in the Monarch raising business: they’ve pupated! Well, the first one has and the second is hanging in the classic “J” shape in preparation for transforming into a chrysalis. The first caterpillar morphed overnight so I didn’t get to directly witness it but hopefully #2 will hold off until morning. They’re both in rather inaccessible corners of the cage so not easy to photograph (ideas in my head for cage improvements for next year) but the beautiful green chrysalis flecked with gold is unmistakable.
As I wait for emergence — probably about 10 days away — I’m pondering the future of this amazing creature and my involvement with them. Various thoughts flit through my mind as I’ve been working with them or watching their behavior, notably what is the future of the Monarch?
Last year I collected about half a pound of milkweed seeds and used them to scatter hundreds of seed bombs in places like vacant lots, power line cuts and drainage ditches. My goal for this year is to harvest a pound, about a quart of seeds, quite a haul considering their size. The pods are off to a good start, easily surpassing last year’s number, but there’s enough of a gardener and farmer’s grandson in me to know not to count your harvest before it is in the barn (or plastic bag). I know better how to collect the seeds, carefully timing the harvest of pods to get them shortly after the split open, fully dried, emabling a quick thumbing to separate the seeds from the silks, much easier than some online suggestions of putting the pods in a bag with some marbles or small stones and shaking to separate the seeds. So with a hopefully larger harvest and better harvesting techniques the one-pound goal seems feasible.
I’ve already started making seed bombs to facilitate distributing this hoped-for bounty, with a couple hundred complete and the ingredients (just compost and clay from cat litter) plentiful so I should have several hundreds if not north of 1000 ready to have some seeds glued to them by fall, and then it’s off to distribute them with drive-by tosses into suitable areas.
Which brings me to the troubling calculus that bedevils any sort of environmental work: is my involvement helping or worsening the situation? Wait…making it worse? How can helping to spread Monarch food plants hurt?
There’s no free lunch. I bought cat litter (pure clay, unscented variety) which had to be mined, dried, milled into small grains, packaged and shipped, all with an associated energy cost. I drove to the store to buy a couple of bags, then there’s driving around actually distributing the seed bombs, burning gas all along the way. I try to do these runs when on the way to some planned destination vs. specialized drives by just selecting alternate, more rural routes as a variance, but there is fuel consumption that wouldn’t happen with these often invariably longer routes. This leaves me tormented with the presumably unanswerable question of would it be better for the environment and thus the Monarch butterfly if I just sat at home?
I have to stick with the belief that I’m making a difference, offering as proof my little patch having attracted a female laying eggs in consecutive years that wouldn’t have been possible with the corn previously grown in those beds. (Racoons kept decimating the corn crop.) Hopefully a few other such patches have germinated from last fall and winter’s bombs and will be mature enough for chipping in their own “butterfly effect” contribution next year.
And speaking of next year, some lessons learned:
- I need to revamp the cage a bit, changing to a wider front-opening hatch for easier access for refreshing their milkweed meals and taking pictures.
- Not sure if this is possible but had the idea today of setting up a remote camera and fast-forwarding through the video every day to spot egg laying activity and rescue more eggs before they succumb to ants or whatever else is eating them. Last two years I’ve just gotten lucky, spotting the activity while swimming, but how many others have I missed?
- I have a much better understanding of how much fresh milkweed I need to provide every day so If I get blessed with some eggs next year I can better/more easily supply their needs.
In the meantime I’ll keep making seed bombs and watch anxiously for my little kids to emerge from their transformation and set them off on their amazing journey.
