According to our neighbor, Jared, his wife is suffering from postpartum depression after releasing the Monarch butterfly she had nurtured from the caterpillar stage. For years my mother-in-law gave us a subscription to National Geographic. We have a whole yellow spine shelf and I really should know the Monarch story. Maybe it just has to be real for me to learn. I thought they migrated from Mexico to Canada and back and they do as a group but individually they don’t live long long enough to make the journey. They go through three or four life cycles on the way.
Milkweeds are key to the butterflies existence. They lay their eggs on the blossom. The caterpillars eat the milkweed leaves and the crawl inside themselves to create a chrysalis which eventually turns transparent before the Monarch emerges. It is all rather mind-blowing.
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Read Barbara Kingsolver’s latest novel Flight Behavior for the frightening facts about climate change and Monarchs. They are very likely to go extinct. It’s a great novel.