Dear West Coast (USA) friends:
(And East Coast friends too)
Please plant native Milkweed. The Western population of Monarch butterflies are in dire trouble. Xerces and Monarch Joint Venture can provide lists of species native to your part of the country. Thank you🦋
Many of us in the midwest are doing just that. I am in a gardening fb group and many of them are doing this… plus, I can’t even count how much of it I see out in fields on my way to and from work.
Yep, I’m right in the middle of the flight path, can confirm this is a real thing…
Sadly…I think the OP’s efforts might be better directed at the South American habitats that are being destroyed…
But it’s much easier just to blame the U.S. rather than confront some rather scary people in other nations.
True. We can only do so much in our neck of the woods to fix these bigger issues in the world. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try, but we cannot control the nature of people in other countries that do not have the first world luxuries that we do…
Unfortunately these other countries need to come to the “environmentalist” mindset on their own, forcing them never seems to work… This mindset usually arrives after their society stabilizes, usually with the emergence of a middle class. I could be wrong of course… this is just how it has worked in most other first world countries that seem to worry about this stuff.
I got to see a tree COVERED in Monarchs, once. I was staying for a week on a small island of the coast of Connecticut… and this tree was just SOLID with Monarchs, it was breath taking.
It is…I’m in Tulsa, Oklahoma and when I was a kid out exploring on my bicycle, I encountered a small grove off of a local park…EVERY TREE was COVERED in Monarchs…it was magical. I still wait to see them every year and I greet them with respect and honor.
We (in the U.S.) are not the problem here…
Unfortunately, the US has turned the corner in many of the world’s environmental issues… So much to the point that we can’t see potential future problems because we are so scared of the monsters of the past.
I worry about future tech and how it may cause bigger problems that scientists are allowed to talk about.
The butterflies and the bees may have bigger issues facing them from those that are trying to fix current ones… History is full of examples of people having good intentions, trying to fix an issue and causing a worse one.
You don’t say? heh
Dave Taft from the NY Times wrote the following on Jan 8, 2016: “The first European starlings (Sturnus vulgaris) were deliberately introduced to the United States around 1890. The thinking of Eugene Schieffelin, chairman of the American Acclimatization Society, was that any bird worthy of inclusion in Shakespeare’s works deserved a place in North America. And so, executing this dubious biological notion — the bird gets a passing mention in Act I of “Henry IV, Part I” — the society released about 60 birds in Central Park. About 35 pairs of starlings were released on the West Coast around the same time by the Portland Song Bird Club.”
It amazes sometime the hubris. I have no better word.
Yup, it used to happen a lot, especially on islands, really wrecked everything
“Introduced species multiply too quickly and become invasive. For example, in 1949, five cats were brought to Marion Island, a part of South Africa in the southern Indian Ocean. The cats were introduced as pest control for mice. By 1977, about 3,400 cats were living on the island, endangering the local bird population.”
Rabbits in Australia.
Do one for catshirts on Woot, and/or cat videos on the internet.
Catshirts are not an invasive species.
I have witnessed this, it is something beautiful. We go to Pismo Beach every winter to see then gathered in the tall, old eucalyptus. There are several sites like that along the California coast.
The schools I went to in San Diego would be covered with Monarch cocoons, butterflies & the ‘pillers’. We were told not to smoosh them. Seriously, they covered the whole areas.
Cool photos
