A monarch dilemma

Plant it and they will come, they said.

I said it myself: “Plant milkweed and the monarch butterflies will come.” They always did until this year.

Even coming off 2023’s all-time second-lowest over-wintering population in the mountains of Mexico, I had high hopes.

With the fringes of my garden bulging with more than 500 milkweed plants, I intended to attract scores of butterflies and to feed and nurture hundreds of their offspring to help the irreplaceable monarchs recover from their disastrous 2023.

None came in June. None came in July. I did not see a monarch in my garden until I began releasing them from my biotent — the fruition of caterpillars procured from the Monarch Research Project.

Unfortunately my experience has been all too common.

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Most other Monarch Zone participants — who release butterflies raised from caterpillars provided by the Monarch Research Project — have seen few if any wild monarchs or their eggs and caterpillars, said Augie Bergstrom, the project’s site manager.

Bergstrom’s contacts include many “autonomous” monarch enthusiasts who collect and protect monarch eggs and caterpillars and release butterflies.

“They can’t find any either this year,” Bergstrom said.

Buchanan County Conservation Department Naturalist Sondra Cabell, in her 20th year monitoring several milkweed patches for monarch eggs and caterpillars, said this summer ranks among “the three or four lowest” in terms of monarch production.

Cabell, who has been tagging late-summer, pre-migration monarchs for more than 20 years, said she expects to reduce her standard order of 1,000 tags to just 200 this year.

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“Monarch eggs, caterpillars and adults have been on the low side this summer,” said Amy Yoakum, Iowa assistant program manager for the Conservation Corps of Minnesota and Iowa.

One member of her field research crew, which visits about 20 Iowa sites per week seeking monarch data, finally saw an egg on Monday, Yoakum said.

Despite the negative reports from Iowa observers, it remains too soon to predict the size of the fall migration, according to the leading authority on the subject, Chip Taylor, founding director of Monarch Watch at the University of Kansas.

A cooler than average summer in many parts of the Upper Midwest likely will result in a later than average migration, which correlates with fewer monarchs reaching over-wintering sites, Taylor said.

“We don’t have a good survey of the number of eggs laid from 20 July to 5 August,” Taylor said. “If we knew that, and could predict the temperature, we could tell everyone what is going to happen next.”