REQUIEM FOR THE MONARCH

It may be difficult as you struggle with the daily onslaught of personal challenges and the very real threats to the survival and well-being of the human race, but today I ask you to spare a thought for the delicate and beautiful monarch butterfly, a creature it seems that may be not long for our world.

We have known since as early as 2014 that the Eastern monarch population was in serious decline. Even at that time, scientific and citizen counts of the insects as they plied their annual migrations through the eastern U.S. to Mexico told us their numbers had declined by 90 percent, largely due to the lack of availability of their major food source, milkweed. It still remains to be seen whether last-ditch efforts by conservation groups and backyard gardeners to plant milkweed and protect remaining habitat can rescue a viable population to ward off extinction of this branch of the monarch family.

The situation on the West Coast of the U.S. is now just as dire for the western monarch, according to new reports from the Xerces Society, a citizens' conservation group quoted January 7 on CNN.com. Their latest migration counts show a dramatic drop in monarch populations in 2018 (20k), as opposed to 148k in 2018. Compare those numbers to the far healthier one million in 1997 and 4.5 million in the 1980s. The western monarchs are on the verge of extinction, largely due to drought, loss of milkweed habitat and pesticides, according to a collaborating study by the journal Biological Conservation.

We are seeing a lot of things disappear these days--beaches, birds, icebergs. But butterflies seem the hardest to flutter from sight.

Cheers, Donna