Delayed monarch listing could be good
A 'butterfly guy' sees promise in what businesses, individuals can do for pollinators
The first of the monarchs released from my backyard this year took wing in June and the last was, unfortunately, hatched and dispatched on November 4.
Before two years ago, seeing a butterfly in by my yard, much less something as big and cool as a monarch, was an occasionally neat thing.
This year, in all, I watched and released 31 healthy monarchs from my backyard, had seven, including that last one, that turned out to have a parasites. Many other caterpillars in my yard were gobbled up by wasps or other predators. I mean, a lot of them.
I now have a sign to put up in my yard that declares it is Monarch Waystation No. 31,130, deemed so because the good folks at Monarch Watch say it has enough milkweed and nectar supplying flowers to help monarchs on their way north in the spring and back south in the fall.
It is now December and I have 56 pots on my back porch with leafless sticks in them. They are button bush saplings I hope to plant in various places next spring. Butterflies love ‘em.
I also have two trays of potting soil out there. One has a mix of seeds of butterfly weed milkweed and honeyvine milkweed (both food sources monarch caterpillars) and the other has a mix of wildflower seeds of all kinds.
This behavior is not typical for me. In fact most of the time that I’m messing around with these plants and pots and seeds in my backyard I’m just guessing my way through. I have, or had, a notoriously black thumb. It seems to be improving.
Yes, I’ve become a butterfly guy.
I’m hooked, and in my own little suburban 60-foot-wide yard I’ve seen what small differences can mean for these incredible insects—and a whole bunch of their cousins.
So, when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on Tuesday announced that adding the monarch butterfly to the list of threatened and endangered species for protection under the Endangered Species Act was “warranted but precluded by work on higher-priority actions,” I was more hopeful than disappointed.
It wasn’t all bad, and it might even be for the best.
Katie Hawk, who is spokeswoman for the Oklahoma Nature Conservancy and for the Oklahoma Monarch & Pollinator Cooperative (the folks that fuel the web site Okies for Monarchs and a bunch of great pollinator programs across the state), spelled out the situation well.
“The silver lining in this announcement is that it will bring more attention to the need for pollinators and that’s what we’re hopeful for, that it will bring emphasis to how critical this is and how rapidly monarchs are declining,” she said.
That the monarch is 161st in line behind other endangered species says something about the status of our environment, but that’s a whole other column. What it means for the monarch is that the USFWS will monitor the species’ progress annually and in 2024 will have to make a final decision.
A sweet lacy frill added to that silver lining Hawk mentioned is that monarchs now are eligible for programs under a conservation tool that can be beneficial to wildlife and businesses, developers or government agencies. It goes by the ever-so-clunky title of a Candidate Conservation Agreement with Assurances.
Just call it a CCAA.
Boiling it down, if you are a business, government agency or developer who sees the (quite likely) Endangered Species Act listing of the monarch in 2024 as something that could raise challenges for the way you do operate, you now have a window of a little more than three years to take advantage of a CCAA. Once the monarch is listed it will be too late.
What a CCAA does is create a formal agreement between the Service and one or more parties to address the conservation needs of species like the monarch. The landowner voluntarily commits to take actions to help stabilize or restore a species, the goal being that maybe listing won’t become necessary.
The potential benefit for the species is obvious. The potential benefits for the landowners/developers/agencies is that if enough take action then mandates that might come with listing could be avoided. Another benefit is that if the species is listed—and the monarch likely will be—the voluntary agreement becomes a permit allowing the landowner some level of “incidental take” of the species relative to its conservation efforts. The agreements also provide potential avenues for some participants to tap into federal or state cost-share programs on their conservation programs, according to the USFWS.
Thus far the grassroots “citizen scientist” efforts to monitor monarchs and improve habitat and local and statewide programs like Oklahoma’s pollinator collaborative have made great strides. Note that my certified yard was No. 31,130. That a lot of certified waystations. But with the pending possible listing of the monarch, some big entities could come into play.
Top of mind are some of the large utility companies with their rights of way. The state’s Department of Transportation comes to mind as well. I’ve written about some of their cooperative research with Oklahoma State University already.
What all this will mean for the monarch is yet to be seen globally, but from what I’ve seen in my own little backyard the past two years, a tiny bit off effort—even if you don’t really know what you’re doing—can go a long way.
I put in a front yard plot that is 4 feet by 12 feet and two backyard strips that were 4X50 and 8X10. That’s only 328 square feet and the monarch production on my property went from zero to at least 31 in two years.
I not only saw monarchs but dozens of other pollinators I otherwise would not have known were near my home. The landscape change over those few hundred square feet made the difference for dozens, maybe hundreds or thousands of organisms I haven’t yet imagined. It’s really something to think about as you consider such efforts on a huge, commercial scale.
At the very least, it makes being a butterfly guy pretty interesting.
Get a head start with Okies for Monarchs
Oklahoma’s pollinator cooperative involves many different entities but all that regular folks really need to know is the Okies for Monarchs moniker and the web site at okiesformonarch.org .
Start at the Okies web site and connect from there with other butterfly and monarch groups through social media pages and other web sites. It is the place to start. You can learn about what other people are doing to help pollinators, find sources for plants and seeds, figure out what seeds and plants you want in the first place, and more.
You first efforts might not be all the pretty, but all you really need to do is start. The butterflies will guide you from there.