Since it really does hurt my husband's feelings if I go too long without mentioning him in my columns, I felt I really must mention him today. Happy birthday Steve! As with all good things you get better with age!
Over the past few weeks I have enjoyed my twice daily walks around our yard more than usual because of the reappearance en masse of an old favorite. It has been a number of years since we saw Monarch butterflies in great numbers in this area, but this fall I have been walking through clouds of them as they gather sustenance to get them through their long migration south for the winter.
Like the hummingbird, Monarch butterflies spend their winters in Mexico and Central America, then migrate north in the spring to summer in the United States and Canada. When I first began working as a reporter for the Courier News, one of the very first things I was sent to photograph was a grove of trees in Dell that was literally covered with brilliant orange wings. They would not even move if you walked right up and stood next to them, especially if it was twilight. Monarchs traditionally travel in large groups, sometimes numbering in the millions, and stop in the same safe roosting spots each year to overnight along the way.
However, it was only a few years later that the numbers began to dwindle, and dwindle fast. Environmental groups screamed that it was the genetically altered crops contaminating the milkweed in the north on which the Monarch larvae feed, but of course that was proven untrue. Then it was the Army Corps of Engineers, a favorite target for these groups, and also proven untrue.
Now I need to say that I have nothing against environmental groups; as a matter of fact I am a member of several of them, and as soon as I realized what it was that was actually killing the butterflies, I began calling every environmental group I could find listed on the Internet. None of them would listen to me. If it did not involve the Corps, they did not want to hear it.
The culprit was, of course, the same thing that has made our honey bees disappear in large part until just this autumn. It put a stop to my second favorite thing of which to take photos each year, the foot-long praying mantises that made their appearance several times a year on the Walmart parking lot and scared patrons to death. The culprit was boll weevil eradication.
We were one of the last areas to go into the eradication program. The first states were in the southeast, where the boll weevil had made it almost impossible for farmers to grow cotton at all. Those states also happened to be located right smack in the middle of the Atlantic Flyway, which runs down the Eastern Seaboard through Georgia, the Carolinas, the Virginias and Tennessee. This flyway is one of two major migration flyways for birds and butterflies traveling north and south seasonally.
Shortly thereafter, and again before the disappearance of the Monarchs became acute, the program was implemented in the southern portions of the second most important flyway in North America, the Mississippi Valley Flyway. By the time the program went into effect here, and into maintenance elsewhere, there were very few migrating Monarchs left, and the only bees we saw out in the rural areas that are heavily planted with cotton were those little black bees that live in the ground and don't sting.
However, after almost a decade of drawing down the boll weevil program, and yes we are in maintenance here and have been for several years, which means the spraying has stopped altogether, the bees are coming back to the rural areas in large numbers. This year for the first time I had tiny baby praying mantises dropping off my nandina bushes. And so many Monarchs passing through that they would actually light on my arms as I walked, sometimes as many as 4 or 5 of them at a time.
The good Lord gave us all things in this world, but that does not mean we have a right to destroy any of them, even by accident. The environmental conditions that spawned those million-member migrations of Monarch butterflies no longer exist, and I have no idea if we will ever get to the place again where it will be possible to see entire groves of trees shimmering with orange and scarlet wings. But we need to at least try to learn a lesson from all of this. We do not need to destroy dozens of wondrous things just to try to control one harmful thing. The tradeoff is just not worth it.
One quick note on a column I wrote a couple of weeks ago about keeping your pets confined on Halloween. There was a tragic incident in Memphis on Halloween night in which a little trick-or-treater was attacked by a German shepherd that got away from its owner. The child was traumatized, requiring stitches and plastic surgery; and the dog was shot by an off duty policeman in order to save the child, then destroyed by animal control officers later.
This was absolutely the fault of the dog owner. People who do not control their pets do not need to have pets, and if they endanger the life of the pet or another human with the pet, they belong in jail. I have also learned that in Tennessee, you can't even own a dog that is not spayed or neutered by law unless you maintain a breeder's permit and adhere to strict guidelines. Time for something like that here in Arkansas, don't you think?
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