Wild Side: A monarch’s life

Much has to go right to keep the intricate and precarious life cycle of the monarch butterfly turning.

For starters, there is the migration, a six-month process that takes successive generations to accomplish.

Late-summer-hatched butterflies undergo a phase called diapause, which suspends reproduction and extends their lives long enough to make the hazardous, 2,000-mile journey to their tiny, remote wintering grounds in the mountains of Mexico — a site that neither they nor their parents has ever seen.

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There each winter scientists measure the area they occupy, which shrunk from about 7 acres in 2021 to a little under 5½ acres last winter, a 22 percent decrease and well less than the 15-acre long-term average needed to sustain the eastern monarch population and its continental migration.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, in late 2020, determined the monarch meets the definition of an endangered species, but the agency lacks the resources to provide additional protection.

Meanwhile, each year the survivors fly north in late winter, depositing eggs in the southern United States, and their offspring carry the cycle forward into the Midwest.

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A few members of this year’s first generation visited my garden in mid-May, and at least one of them laid a dozen pin-head-sized eggs on the undersides of the leaves of my common and swamp milkweed plants.

Within a few days those eggs had hatched into barely visible larvae — eating machines that, within two weeks of their emergence, grew to almost 2,000 times their original mass.

When they were half grown, I rounded up 11 caterpillars and placed them into a small mesh enclosure with six water-filled fruit jars, each holding three freshly cut milkweed stems. They devoured those leaves and a second cutting before transforming into beautiful green chrysalises.

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The first butterfly emerged on June 16, and the last came out Wednesday at the start of the longest day of the year. As they and other second-generation monarchs flit about my garden, finding mates, laying eggs and keeping the cycle turning, they also, with their innate beauty and attunement to their idiosyncratic nature, greatly enhance my enjoyment of the time I spend watering my parched garden and sitting in the shade watching it grow.

Debbie Jackson — a conservation specialist with Monarch Watch, a leading monarch conservation group, posting on Monarchs in Eastern Iowa’s Facebook page — said adopting and protecting eggs and little caterpillars from the first generation ovipositing in May markedly increases their survival.

“So instead of 2 percent surviving, maybe it’s 5 percent or 10 percent overall. That means more adults eclosing in June, and that will increase the monarch population by a bit,” she wrote.

Even were that not true, I would husband monarchs simply for the pleasure of having them around.