Hundreds came to their feet to applaud Bill Toone, the sound pale in comparison to what the conservation biologist related the past hour during “Roar of the Monarch Butterfly.”
Just before gathering a backpack and carry on for the airport, I caught Toone’s message as my last session at the Keep America Beautiful 2024 National Conference in San Diego earlier this month. There is head knowledge of prominent threatened and endangered species then there is the moment when you see the plight through another person’s eyes. Toone connected with a diverse audience through humor, personal experience and facts related to, perhaps, the world’s most famous winged insect. The rest of the presentation’s title put the ball in our court with a call to action: The Sound of a Billion Butterflies is Fading, But You Can Help!
A thirty-four-year time frame, based on Toone’s first date with his wife Sunny when they tagged Monarchs, illustrated changes as the couple has traveled to Mexico to see the butterflies and lead tours every season since. Back then I was about the same age my daughter is now. Monarchs were common enough in Northwest Nebraska. I remember learning the distinguishing characteristics to avoid confusing similar-sized orange butterflies. A few hours before sunrise on an early autumn day, my only Monarch sighting of 2023 came on a Pine Ridge hiking trail. I could only admire the extreme traveler as he flitted away. En route to reach an overlook, my camera was zipped in the pack.
Facts stored in the back of my mind about Monarchs pinged as Toone outlined their lifecycle. He noted the species has been introduced throughout the world. Caterpillars grow from 2,000 to 3,000 times their original weight, storing cardiac glycosides that are passed on in the chrysalis “so the butterfly is poisonous to predators,” he said. People who find one of the plump striped caterpillars in the final (wandering) stage should not put it back on a plant as the goal is to find a safe spot to form its chrysalis. To illustrate the complete transformation, Toone observed that even opening the changing chamber right away would reveal something that looks like green soup. Butterflies that emerge in Canada, the Methuselah generation, migrate all the way to Mexico. Monarchs take four generations a year to return.
Choose a discipline to study, cause to rally around or even a serious hobby and there are people who came before that were instrumental in its development. For the uninitiated, Toone told the story of Fred and Norah Urquhart. Fred was a little kid in southern Canada and fell in love with Monarchs, he said. Fred would go on to earn a PhD. in Entomology. He enlisted volunteers ranging from hippies to service clubs in California to tag the butterflies for tracking. “Fred and Norah tracked them all over the United States and lost them at the U.S./Mexico border,” Toone said. “Norah did a radio show and got a story published in Mexico City asking for help to find them.” During two years spent trying to find the tagged butterflies, Fred and Norah talked to some of the indigenous people discovering 978 tons of Monarchs in their part of the forest. Fred turned to them and asked why they didn’t tell anybody, Toone related. They answered, “Doesn’t this happen everywhere?” Fred sat down and out of 1 billion Monarchs picked up one with his tags.
Toone left last week for Mexico where there are now 10 percent of the Monarchs found three decades ago. The butterflies have a symbiotic relationship with the specific species of birch they land on. “You can stand and feel, hear the roar of Monarch wings as they warm up the trees. The roar we heard 34 years ago is a whisper today. People in this room can change that,” he emphasized.
Founding ECOLIFE Conservation, Toone showed how providing woodburning stoves has helped counter Monarch habitat loss. Residents no longer have to breathe smoke for three-stone cooking fires and require less fuel than the up to 40 trees they had been cutting down. Just completing their 15,000th stove, ECOLIFE has saved a million trees.
Loss of habitat has also reached critical levels in America, Toone said as he showed pictures of urban and agriculture settings, adding “Now we even spray weeds along roadsides.” He encouraged the audience to plant milkweed to sustain and attract monarchs. Even though Toone said it is best to plant varieties native to the area, he admitted tropical milkweed is here to stay. Tropical has more toxicity, which the butterflies crave and will find up to three miles away. “Plant a couple tropicals to really attract them, they’ll stay for native milkweed,” he said.
More than enough time to order milkweed seeds to plant here before spring. Within a few years our “Oasis in the Sandhills” could quench the thirst of a kaleidoscope of Monarchs.