Posts Tagged ‘monarch butterflies’

Tuesday, September 5, 2023

DEC: Help monarch butterflies on their long migration south 

Monarch butterfly after it emerged from a chrysalis.

Monarch butterflies  (Danaus plexippus) begin their annual fall migration around mid-August. These butterflies are the great-great-grandchildren of the monarchs that migrated to Mexico last fall.   You can help monarchs by providing food (nectar) and keeping those areas protected:

  • Turn a portion of your lawn into a wildflower meadow—plant milkweed or other native wildflowers.
  • Delay mowing areas with milkweed until later in the fall.
  • Avoid using herbicides—they kill all life-stages of monarchs (egg, caterpillar, pupa, and adult).
  • Report sightings of adults online. View a map of the sightings so far this year.

» Continue Reading.


Saturday, August 12, 2023

Bee Balm Going Gang Busters & Butterflies Enjoying Milkweeds

Hummingbird in bee balm.

The heat from Arizona to the east coast hasn’t let up, with [temperatures in] many major cities in the hundreds every day…some over a month now. We are on the cool side, with more rain and thunderstorms passing through. Last Friday [August 4] as we were getting ready to go to the opening of the National Watercolor Show at View [Arts Center in Old Forge] one of those storms had quite a bit of hail in the mix. I did hear of some places across the state that got quarter-size (and bigger) hail in that same storm as it crossed the state.

» Continue Reading.


Saturday, October 29, 2022

An Adirondack fall: Saw Whet Owls, ladybugs, and deer hunting

The coldest morning so far (at 24 degrees) did in my dahlias, which had several blooms still trying to come out. I covered my toad lilies and saved them for a few more blooms, then cut them off and brought them inside where they are blooming in water on the windowsill. The warm spell over the weekend sure hatched out the ladybugs. There were hundreds trying to get in somewhere to spend the winter on the sunny side of the house and garage. They get under the edges of my windows, and I find them when I release one of my banded birds out the window.

» Continue Reading.


Sunday, October 23, 2022

Mowing blues

mowing

 

by Bibi Wein

We’d been walking since dawn. The midday sun was hot, but the night we’d spent in the forest under a makeshift shelter of hemlock boughs had been cold and long. It was our second summer here. My husband and I had stepped out of our cabin for a short walk before dinner, lost our way. Sixteen hours later, we were still lost in the woods. We’d trudged uphill and down, slogged through swamps, followed old logging roads that led nowhere. Now we were on yet another narrow, winding track, dense with shrubs and wildflowers. Suddenly: a power pole. We were home! Or very nearly so.Until that moment, we hadn’t realized  our own road was as wild as the forest around it. 

» Continue Reading.


Saturday, September 24, 2022

Time has come for the protection of Monarch Butterflies

Another year has passed for me, and only one more for the “Big 80,” but things are looking good on this end. For others on this side of the globe, things aren’t looking so good this morning [Sept. 20]. Hurricane Fiona has clobbered Puerto Rico with over thirty inches of rain and strong winds that have again devastated their power grid five years to the day when they were hit by Hurricane Maria. They had just about recovered from that one and everything got laid flat again. The hurricane heading north hit the Dominican Republic and will end up in the Canada Maritimes. This will also push high tides all along the east coast while going north.

» Continue Reading.


Saturday, September 17, 2022

Witnessing 90-Miler start, crossing paths with a toad after Woodhull Fire Tower lighting

No hummer seen today [Monday, September 12] but there may be some stragglers coming through, so we leave the feeders up for several days and if we don’t see them for about five days, we call them gone. They sure have been a treat this summer, as they have buzzed around the front porch doing touch and go practice out on our five feeders. Going back to last weekend, my grandson Jake and I went up to the Woodhull Fire Tower on Saturday night to light up the tower. I was glad to have the company, and the sunset was beautiful. As the night sky crept in, we could see that looking east was going to be a problem as haze moved in with the darkness.

» Continue Reading.


Tuesday, September 13, 2022

Protecting Monarchs in the Adirondacks

by Lisa Salamon, Adirondack Pollinator Project

 

The iconic Monarch butterfly was added to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature Red List of Threatened Species in July. The List, known as the IUCN Red List, founded in 1964, is the world’s most comprehensive inventory of the global conservation status of biological species. It uses a set of precise criteria to evaluate the extinction risk of thousands of species and is recognized as the most authoritative guide to the status of biological diversity.

» Continue Reading.


Thursday, August 25, 2022

Paul Smith’s VIC to host free Monarch Fest on Sept. 3

The International Union for Conservation of Nature recently added the migratory monarch butterfly, known for their flight to California and Mexico during the winter, to their “Red List,” a compilation of animals that they deem endangered. The native populations of this butterfly have shrunk by at least 22% in the past decade, due to numerous  factors, including deforestation, pesticides, and climate change.

 

Deforestation in Mexico and California to clear the way for urban spaces, has destroyed much of the monarch’s shelter. Pesticides and herbicides used in large-scale agriculture have killed butterflies and milkweed, the plant that the larvae feed off of. Drought, wildfires, and extreme weather and temperatures caused by climate change has also damaged these butterflies’ homes, as well as killed many of them.

 

In celebration of these beautiful creatures, Paul Smith’s VIC has organized a Monarch Fest which is scheduled for September 3 from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. This event is free and open to the public.

» Continue Reading.


Saturday, August 13, 2022

That’s a wrap for loon banding season 2022

It was getting very dry as the pond was down three inches from the overflow. Because of the heat, the trout decided to stay in the deep water and not jump the last two nights. I got just about an inch in my rain gauge, which will help. The flowers keep growing, and my cup plant is over seven feet tall now and it just started flowering. I put a six-foot wire fence around it this year to hold it up and it is way over that. The bees and hummers like it, and then the fall warblers like the bugs it attracts, and the seed eaters like the flower seeds.

» Continue Reading.


Saturday, July 30, 2022

Banding and testing loons for pollutants with the Adirondack Center for Loon Conservation

It took a whole week with temperatures in the high eighties before the thunderstorms made it here. The storms dumped almost two inches of rain at Eight Acre Wood overnight, so again I don’t have to water the garden. I did have to water my tomato trees that are in pots almost everyday during that hot time. I’ve picked a few cherry tomatoes which are a tasty bite. The larger tomatoes are growing daily after I pruned off the leaves that had no flowers on them, and now I can even see tomatoes growing.

 

Most of my loons have hatched their young, but I still have one sitting on eggs. The male was glued to the nest yesterday while the female was at a neighboring lake fishing. If the eggs are going to hatch it should happen this week. Sometimes the eggs get chilled in high water and the eggs are not going to hatch. However, the adults sit on them sometimes for over forty days before giving up. Locally, most of the nests have been successful this year, and there are chicks on many of the local lakes. If you come upon them in your travels, give them some space. Don’t force them out into open water when they are hugging the shoreline fishing and keeping out of boat traffic.

» Continue Reading.


Thursday, May 26, 2022

A butterfly, a poem

butterfly
Author’s note: My husband & I rescued some milkweed plants from a store dumpster and raised some Monarch butterflies from the Monarch caterpillars on them. The metamorphoses was amazing.  Hope we did some good for the world.  Made me think that butterflies and poets are much alike in their creative process and hence, this poem.

Saturday, November 6, 2021

Monarchs: How High Can They Fly?

monarchsMigrating Monarchs Soaring at Unbelievable Heights

Monarch Migration has been known to be one of nature’s most spectacular events.  Every Fall up to 500,000 monarchs leave the colder regions to seek solace in warmer areas throughout the United States as well as Mexico.  Many people here in the Adirondacks are aware of when they first see these beauties in early Summer and when they stop seeing them as fall sets in but have never witnessed the gathering of thousands of monarchs in preparation of their migrating group flight.

» Continue Reading.


Thursday, October 7, 2021

Butterfly house: Where Humanity and Nature Unite

butterfly house

SKY Lyfe was born out of love for the tiny life keepers, we call bees and butterflies.  As apiarists and lepidopterists our hearts were moved over a decade ago, to research and support some of the World’s most innocent insects as well as one of the most feared. It is our mission to bring awareness to these creatures, in hopes of conserving their lives and global importance to humans and animals alike.

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Friday, August 6, 2021

A tagged Monarch Butterfly from Paul Smith’s found in Mexico

monarch butterflyOn a warm sunny day in late September the Monarch butterflies at the Paul Smith’s College Visitors Interpretive Center (VIC) readied for their journey to Mexico. In our butterfly house we tag monarchs so they can be tracked on their journey south. They are tagged with small stickers and given individual numbers. This year one very special Monarch from our butterfly house, number AAMZ679, was found in El Rosario, Mexico! This means this Monarch butterfly traveled 3,000 miles from the Butterfly House to reach El Rosario!

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Friday, March 5, 2021

2021 outlook for monarchs in the Adirondacks

monarch butterflyThe size of the overwintering population of Eastern monarch butterflies was just released on Feb 25, and the number shows yet another decline (to a total of 2.1 hectares/ 5.2 acres; details are shown in the figure below). What does this mean for the Adirondacks this coming summer?  Monarchs were abundant in the Adirondack region in 2018, just as they had been decades ago, but 2021 will be a year of many fewer, just as it was in 2020 and most recent years.

Monarchs are in decline because of multiple threats throughout their life cycle: the loss of milkweed because of industrialized agriculture in their main midwestern breeding area; logging of the overwintering forests in Mexico; drought and loss of nectar sources due to climate change; and increasing severity of killing storms.

Recently the US Fish & Wildlife service declared monarchs to be “warranted but precluded” for listing under the Endangered Species Act. That decision is well explained at: https://monarchjointventure.org/blog/faqs-endangered-species-act-listing-decision-for-monarch-butterflies. It means that the federal government will take no actions for the time being to reverse this decline even though the current figure of 2.1 hectares is much below the estimated number of 6 hectares required to sustain monarch migration.

» Continue Reading.



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