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Protecting pollinators

Migrating monarchs important to ecosystem, food growth

CONTRIBUTED PHOTO
A monarch butterfly sits with a tag placed by a volunteer on its wing. The tags are used to track population locations and travels during the fall and spring migrations.

Fluttering orange and black wings speckled with white spots make the monarch butterfly an unmistakable creature to many in Central Iowa and the United States.

A mass migration of the popular insect is about to float through Iowa and much of the Midwest as the monarchs head south to Mexico to rest during the colder months up north. The monarch is not only easily recognizable, it is also an important pollinator which, like many other key insects, is losing territory in parts of its range.

“Monarchs are one of those species that everybody loves to see and it makes them happy. It’s one of those really lovable species, so when their population drops it catches people’s attention,” said Marshall County Conservation Board naturalist Emily Herring.

Each fall during the species’ major migration, an effort is in place to catch, tag and release individual butterflies to get a better sense of the population’s numbers, location and health.

Flight of the monarchs

Herring said the first few weeks of September is an active time for monarchs as they begin to migrate south.

“Most of the time, they stay kind of in this upper Midwest region, although sometimes they go up into Canada during the summer months,” she said.

During that, the butterflies reproduce over several short-lived generations, each going through its life cycle in about a month. The migrating generation being born about this time of year is unique, though.

“This last generation, instead of living about a month, they actually live longer and that’s so they can fly down to Mexico and they live down there,” Herring said. “They kind of are in almost a dormant stage down there … and they stay there until the next spring, at which point in time they start to move back north.”

Many of those “last generation” bugs born ahead of the migration are currently in their yellow-green and black caterpillar form. The caterpillar eggs are laid on milkweed plants exclusively, and those plants are the only food source during the caterpillar stage. They then form a protective chrysalis and emerge as an unmistakeable monarch.

As the butterflies move into the area in greater numbers, Herring said a group of dedicated volunteers is at the ready to help study the population. One of those volunteers is Marshalltown resident Jack Mackin, who with his wife Linda Mackin has tagged hundreds of butterflies in recent years.

Mackin said they got interested because of Marshall County Conservation programming at a local school where Linda worked.

“We just got interested in attempting to help get the habitat back and help track the butterflies so they could get a better sense of what’s going on with them,” Mackin said. “We always like to be outdoors as much as possible instead of just walking out to Grimes Farm on a path, we decided maybe we could go out to the country.”

The couple previously lived in Clemons and family members owned some land near St. Anthony that included 8 acres of wildflowers, providing excellent monarch habitat.

That isn’t the only hotspot the couple has found. With permission, the Mackins also tagged butterflies at patches of ground near Slumberland and Menards in Marshalltown. The small prairie at Marshalltown Public Library is another spot they have found success at.

“When they’re flying in and landing on the flowers, that is the best way to catch them,” Mackin said. “I usually do the catching and Linda is there with the paperwork and the tag.”

He said they record the date and location of the tag and then release the butterfly. The tag itself has the look of a small sticker, about the width of a pinky finger on many people, Mackin said.

An important pollinator

Herring and Mackin said monarchs are an important species to protect.

“Over the last few years, there’s been recognition that the monarch population has gone down,” Herring said. “The basic fact is when their population drops, we’ve also noticed that other pollinators’ populations are dropping as well.”

She said all pollinators, which also include bees, wasps, beetles, ants and other insects, are a key part of growing food throughout the United States. By buzzing or crawling from plant to plant, the bugs facilitate the plants’ reproduction and growth.

That process produces apples, grapes, pumpkins, coffee beans, cucumbers, tomatoes, avocados, peaches, plums, apricots and countless other fruits and vegetables.

“There are very few things you can eat that don’t require pollination,” Herring said. “Without pollinators, we would be in trouble.”

As the sole food source for monarch caterpillars, milkweed is especially important to the continued health of the species’ population. Herring said milkweed can be targeted for spraying and mowing down where it pops up, including at ditches near farmground.

“My mother-in-law, who grew up on a farm, they just let the milkweed grow wherever now. She says ‘My father would roll over in his grave if he saw all this milkweed,'” Herring said. “But it’s really important to start leaving that milkweed.”

She said regular weed spraying measures most farmers use on their crop fields is enough to cover against milkweed invading the corn and soybean soils.

Mackin said he agrees that leaving milkweed alone is important for monarch population health.

“It’s just another one of God’s creatures that we just don’t want to lose. They depend so much on the regular milkweed for their survival,” he said.

While he said he does not force his views on others, Mackin does proudly leave milkweed to grow on land his family owns. That sometimes draws questions from others about why he doesn’t mow the plants down.

“I do make them aware that I am very interested in keeping it and our wildflower patch up there,” he said.

Both Herring and Mackin said going out and tagging monarchs is not just an important activity, it is also quite enjoyable.

“It just gets you out into the sunlight and gets you much closer to nature,” Mackin said.

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