Monarchs--A Miracle in Need of a Miracle

As monarch butterflies begin their migration south towards a home they've never seen but somehow know how to get to, in the mountains northwest of Mexico City, the annual miracle we've long taken for granted appears threatened. Overwintering numbers were down by 60% last winter from the year before. The total population of eastern monarchs occupied only three acres in Mexico's 130,000 acre mountain preserve. The word from New Hampshire to Michigan is that sightings are way down this year. I've seen only two of these beautiful creatures in my wildflower-packed backyard this summer, and none laid eggs on the many swamp milkweeds. What a contrast with 2007, when we had great numbers of larvae, some of which we grew in a glass bowl and later released.

Though threats of logging in the overwintering forest have now been greatly reduced, the monarchs face the increasing weather extremes associated with climate change, and the increasingly hostile North American landscape. In other words, the struggle to save the monarchs has shifted from a point source problem (their overwintering habitat) to a nonpoint source problem (the quality of habitat across the eastern U.S. and Canada).

Above all, Monarchs need to encounter milkweed as they head north from Mexico into Texas, then fan out across the midwest and east coast, with one generation giving way to the next. Last year, deep drought in Texas and elsewhere desiccated what milkweed they could find, but the even bigger problem is 100 million or more acres of farmland that once hosted some milkweed, but now have been converted to Roundup Ready corn and soybeans. 90% of corn is now grown in this way, eliminating most weeds. Fields are planted right up to fencelines and roadsides, eliminating even the borders that once were havens for milkweed.

If you drive out Quaker Bridge Road in Princeton, you can see milkweed rising up above the other weeds in a fallow field. Compare this with the picture at this link, of a corn field in Iowa. Corn for as far as the eye can see.

The photo here on the left (closeup below) shows patches of common milkweed (Asclepias syriaca), which spreads underground and is the most common around Princeton. Swamp milkweed blooms later, doesn't spread, and has softer leaves which you'd think the larvae would prefer, but not necessarily. Butterflyweed is a particularly beautiful milkweed with a disk of brilliant orange flowers, occasionally seen in drier meadows. There are additional prairie species of milkweed rarely encountered hereabouts.

With America's heartland becoming so hostile to Monarchs, the question increasingly becomes whether the butterflies will be able to make it to New Jersey in sufficient numbers to take advantage of the milkweed growing here. In the past ten years, acreage of overwintering butterflies in Mexico has dropped from 25 down to 3. The Roundup Ready corn was first sold commercially in 1998. Overuse of Roundup for growing these genetically engineered crops has led some weeds like giant ragweed, pigweed (both of these species grow in Princeton), and many others to gain resistance to glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup. Presumably, milkweed has yet to develop resistance.

On the way out to Route 1, I stopped recently near the canal on Quaker Bridge Road to look out on a field where once I saw many Monarchs feasting on a sea of yellow tickseed sunflower (Bidens) blooms. Almost no Bidens there this year, for whatever reason.

Further down the road, near the canal bridge, there was some Bidens, but no Monarchs. Neither did I see any Monarchs on the ribbon of yellow blooms along the right of way at the Sourlands Mountains Preserve the week before.

I doubt these fishermen at the DR Canal noticed any change in the air.

Certainly drivers navigating narrow Quaker Bridge Road would not take note of any absence in the fields around them. The state of the monarch is but one of the changes quietly happening in the blur of green off to the side as we race forward.

It would be a relief if their numbers rise again, as they did after a very low year in 2004/05, but the trend is towards more agricultural herbicide and unstable climate, not less.

One question at the back of my mind is whether they depend at all on large numbers, to find each other to mate, and to make the long flight back to Mexico. Might large numbers help their momentum as they migrate, much like we are swept along by the momentum of the crowd on an urban sidewalk?

After a long drought in sightings, the visit from this monarch in my backyard a few days ago, feasting for an hour on aster and ironweed nectar, was a real gift. I wish for the past luxury of taking them for granted, though it's hard to think of them with anything but a sense of wonder. Now, this miracle needs another--a nation that cares enough to change its farming practices and the kind of energy it uses, if not for the Monarch, then for ourselves.

There was one day, as a boy walking home across the expansive lawn of Yerkes Observatory in Wisconsin, when I looked up to see the sky completely filled with Monarchs passing through. Such a sight stays with you forever. Though the memory is mine, it is each year's new generations of Monarchs, migrating 2500 miles to New Jersey, that bring it back.

In New Jersey, monarchs migrating south get channeled through Cape May. Here's a blog with daily updates on numbers.

Below are some articles:

One on NPR radio, another in The New York Times,
and a USAtoday article, which may pester you with an ad on an attached video.

An explanation of how they navigate can be found here.

Positive Energy--Open Space and Jazz

The world throws plenty of obstructions in the way of doing the right thing, but sometimes all of those obstructions fade into the background and good things start to happen. For two days, I rode a wave of positive energy, as people expressed a love of inner and outer nature, through tending and attending, spiffing up, getting down, riffing melodies, lopping, chopping and bebopping, blazing trails and just being simply amazing. It all started with the customary Sunday morning gathering of volunteers to spiff up Pettoranello Gardens.

This time, the regulars with the Pettoranello Foundation were helped out by members of the Rotary Club, an organization that does good works here and abroad. Along with the rewards of physical work, these workdays offer a chance to catch up with old friends.

Next stop was the Jazz Feast, featuring five groups, with guitar great Bucky Pizzarelli who's still digging deep into the grooves at 87,

and a very talented group led by British Columbia native Bria Skonberg. Her trumpet style harkens back to Louis Armstrong, with some innovative touches ala Jimi Hendricks thrown in. She mixes mean trumpet with sweet vocals on tunes like Sunny Side of the Street.

Meanwhile, on the post-consumer side of the festival, there was an innovation from the previous year in the fling department, as the organizers demonstrated the benefits of covering the recycling receptacle with a lid with a small hole, so trash would be less likely to mix with the empty bottles and cans.

After being part of the record crowds at Palmer Square, it was back the next morning to Princeton's nature preserves, with 38 Stuart School 7th graders arriving at Mountain Lakes to plant native wildflowers as part of a habitat restoration project. This workday was meaningful on multiple levels. Stuart School shares the same watershed with Mountain Lakes, which is to say the water from the school's roofs, parking lots and athletic fields flows down through the lakes. The kids were discovering, and tending to, the watershed beyond the boundaries of their school.

The plants, meanwhile--all grown from seed collected from local, indigenous populations--were grown in the greenhouse just a few steps away from the restoration site. One thing we've learned the hard way in restoration work is that it's best to start close in and work our way out, rather than choose a remote site that involves a long haul and less convenient follow up.

Aelin Compton (left), who followed me at the Resource Manager position I encouraged Friends of Princeton Open Space to create years back, was happy as could be with all the spirited help. Clark Lennon and Andrew Thornton, frequent volunteers at Mountain Lakes, were on hand to help channel all the energy.

Even a brief rain turned out to be a plus. With the kids gathered under the patio roof, I happened to find a little frog in the grass and set it on a table without saying a word. Instant excitement and fascination. That frog was like a rock star, or a pond star.

We did a Rorschach test with this photo. Is it a crab? The skull of a steer?

One of my favorite sedges, called woolgrass, was growing in the vegetated buffer along the upper lake's edge. Most native sedges start early in the spring and are by now flopped over and looking spent, but woolgrass gets a later start and keeps its form.

Work and discovery went hand in glove. Not sure what the caterpillar is.

Then it was off to the other side of town, heading northeast out Snowden Lane to Herrontown Woods for the afternoon. Deep caring and determination is finding all sorts of expressions out that way, starting with the sign itself, which Kurt Tazelaar has liberated from the enveloping foliage.

Kurt is standing in the initial opening he cut through the one remaining windblown obstruction on some 200 acres of trail he and Sally Curtis cleared in Herrontown Woods and Autumn Hill Reservation over the course of two months. Kurt's brother, John, who back in the 70s at Little Brook Elementary would walk with his classmates to Herrontown Woods for field trips, found himself enlisted in the cause for a couple days while visiting town. Many of the trails had been impassable for years. Volunteer hours, including some of my own, are approaching 400 for this renovation.

A rough count of tree rings on this white oak show that it was growing before the 1870 farm cottage was built nearby.

To learn more about these initiatives, go to Facebook.com/FriendsOfHerrontownWoods, Facebook.com/FOPOS, and http://www.ppscf.org/Thegardens.html.

When the Indoors Moves Outdoors

Out of college, my jazz pursuits distracting me from any high-powered career, I took a "day gig" with TLC Plant Care, which involved driving from one restaurant to another, watering the indoor plants. This was before silk plants, DJs, and iPods took the uncertainty and employment out of indoor foliage and music. "Bone dry!" my supervisor would exclaim with enthusiasm as she introduced me to the art of watering plants hung above diners in a large sunroom. "Would you like some browned fern leaves in your salad?", I imagined myself asking as I hovered above the surprised customers, teetering on a step ladder, watering can in hand. One trick helped speed the process. Because the pots were made of plastic, it was easy to tell if the plants needed water simply by their weight.

In other, darker restaurants, peace lilies and philodendrons sat in gloomy corners in an arrested state of development that echoed the trajectory of my career. Later, I got a job taking care of plants at the Michigan Union, the student center for the University of Michigan, on the front steps of which John F. Kennedy had announced his plans for the Peace Corps. Over several years, I noticed that whenever my consistent tender loving care--learned in the prior job--had elevated one or another potted plant to a state of perfection, that plant would either be stolen or vomited into. The latter tended to coincide with a big victory by one of the U of M sports teams. Now, any student in a celebratory mood wishing to vomit in the U-Club had a wide selection of well-tended potted plants to choose from, and yet some uncanny force at work in the universe somehow guided the celebrant unerringly towards the pick of the litter. Ever since, I've had a heightened awareness of how tenuous can be perfection's foothold in the world.

Since leaving that job, I've felt little love for indoor plants, preferring outdoor plants that at least have a chance of reaching sexual maturity and leading lives of their own. Predictably, as our few indoor plants around the house have languished, the wildflowers outside have thrived.

It can be a relief, after those years of tending to the light-deprived, to travel to warmer climes and see Dracaena marginatas reaching for the sky,

and encounter a Ficus benjamina whose roots aren't trapped in a pot,

with permission to grow and grow without fear of crashing into the ceiling,

a banana tree that actually bears bananas,

and a pothos no longer subject to the vicissitudes of human care.

Some indoor plants hide neglect well, but the pothos I tended always advertised neglect for all to see. Years of consistent care could be lost in just a few days of neglect. How sad it was, after somehow forgetting to water a pothos one week, to then have to pick off a long string of yellow leaves, leaving as a permanent reminder the long stretch of skinny, leafless stem.

We like our indoor plants, and somehow remember to give them enough attention to survive, but it's good to know that somewhere in the world (in this case Puerto Iguazu in northern Argentina), these plants' kin can truly thrive.

Hawk-Duck Standoff

A typical day in the backyard, the ducks hanging out, inbetween swims in the miniponds and forays to glean whatever they glean from the lawn when it's moist. The largest is the white Pekin duck on the left, with four mostly grown mallard chicks back under the lawn furniture with their mother.

But one afternoon a few days ago, I saw the Pekin chasing the young ducks into the bushes, as if it were bullying them--something I'd never seen the big duck do.

Five or ten minutes later, my daughter looked out the window to see the ducks gone and a hawk perched on the lawn furniture. Never a good sign, if you have urban poultry, but at least it wasn't giving chase to any of the ducks.

It seemed puzzled about what to do next. We ran out, and the hawk flew off, a little smaller than others, and with a beautiful fresh look to the feathers--all the more beautiful because it was flying away without any dinner.

Judging from how the white Pekin duck quickly spots soaring birds overhead, I'd guess it hadn't been bullying the younger ducks but instead herding them to cover, having spied the hawk before any of the rest of us. The big Pekin lumbers about with an exaggerated waddle, and its periodic attempts at flight are reminiscent of the flying machine the chickens build in the claymation film Chicken Run, but it may be playing the role of guardian, just vigilant and intimidating enough to keep the hawks at bay.

Color Begets Color

If you think of a flowering plant as a slow-motion firework, with a summerlong rise up to a shower of color ("Fireworks" is actually the name of a variety of goldenrod), then the goldfinch in this photo is reminiscent of those fireworks that flash in the sky, then send another ring of color out beyond the initial display, like booster rockets. As I approach, the goldfinches rise up out of the cutleaf coneflowers, flashes of gold headed to a nearby tree limb to wait until I leave.

They don't seem to care if the seeds are ripe or not, descending on the seedheads before all the petals have fallen. Being small and lightweight is an advantage when perching on a slim stem.

Other airborne yellows arrive, like this Clouded Sulphur (Colias sp.),

and a tiger swallowtail, relatively common this year, here on a cup plant bloom.

A red-spotted purple (Limenitis arthemis) showed up one day on the boneset.

This yellow-collared scape moth (Cisseps fulvicollis) is a more frequent visitor.

This is the multiplicating capacity of a wildflower garden, to layer interest upon interest. The boneset in particular are like small ecosystems, creating at least a three-tiered food chain of flower, dozens of kinds of pollinator, plus various predators thereof.

Giant Swallowtail Butterfly

Though it's been an awful year for monarch butterflies (more on that soon), the swallowtails have had a good year. I've seen mostly the yellow swallowtails, but this unusual one showed up in the backyard one day last week, ignoring the ocean of wildflowers in favor of a leaf.

Apparently more typical of the south, the giant swallowtail's caterpillars feed on members of the Rutaceae--the citrus family. Since oranges and lemons don't grow in New Jersey, that leaves lesser known members of the Rutaceae, such as the native wafer ash and prickly ash, to serve as hosts in the giant swallowtail's life cycle. I've never encountered either of these host species growing around Princeton, so the butterfly's presence here is a bit of a mystery.

A discussion group at GardenWeb.com mentions a couple possible causes of its occasional appearance hereabouts. One is that a so-called "big flight year" occurs, in which weather conditions cause butterflies to travel more than usual. Another is quoted from Butterflies of New Jersey by Michael Gochfeld - "The larvae and pupae of this species are sold commercially and the resulting adults are often released, rendering suspect any sighting of this species in New Jersey."

Here's a list of New Jersey butterflies, which includes the giant swallowtail.

Mountain Hunting in NJ--The Sourland Mountains

End of the summer, and realizing we hadn't climbed a mountain yet, it was off to the highish hills of New Jersey. There are a few mountains to choose from, if you use the word loosely. Most mountainesque might be the high rise next to the Delaware Water Gap. Closer to home is Baldpate Mountain (highest point in Mercer County!). South Mountain Reservation, sporting hilltop views of the Newark and NY skylines, sounds interesting.

But my daughter and I decided to head up to the Belle Mead Coop for poultry feed and then over to the Sourland Mountain Preserve.

There you find a large parking lot, a pond, a kiosk that actually has a replenished supply of maps, and a trail up into boulder land. Boulders large and small, to climb up or step around, boulders that beg to be sat upon, the better to gaze out upon the others.

The trees, too, like to sit upon the rocks, having little choice, there not being much actual soil.

When first seen, I thought this scene would be rare, but trees are growing upon rocks everywhere.

Black birches are the ones most taken with the boulders.

My daughter caught this incendiary scene,

just before we reached a linear meadow ablaze with Bidens.

I had read of the Roaring Rocks, and we finally found them at the far end of the five mile trail, roaring very quietly. Maybe they roar more loudly when the stream that flows underneath them is swelled by rains. Even without sound effects, they are impressive, and look fun to climb upon if you don't have a small dog that could disappear at any moment into the cracks between them.

On the way back, a sugar maple bent by age and circumstance. Sugar maples in particular gain character with age, reminding me somehow of a pipe-smoking english professor from college days.

I told my daughter that this polka dot boulder field reminded me of 101 Dalmatians. She said it looked more like zombies to her. What will the next generation see?

The linear meadow offered a shortcut back to the parking lot. Most of these right of ways that criss-cross New Jersey, like the one that crosses the Princeton Ridge, are becoming monocultures of mugwort and/or Sericea lespedeza, but this one still has some diversity,

with at least two kinds of native bushclover that I've never seen in Princeton, some towering sunflowers,

Indian grass bending towards the pathway, and the great yellow sea of Bidens.

The walk lasted four hours, though there were cutbacks if we had wanted to shorten it. Just a twenty minute drive, and for anyone who walks the ridge in Princeton alot, whether in Witherspoon Woods, Woodfield Reservation, or Herrontown Woods, the Sourland Mountains Preserve offers many parallels, some new twists, and a fine zigging and zagging through bulked up boulders.