Students dig in to provide food, habitat for monarch butterflies
REBECCA S. GRATZ / THE WORLD-HERALD
Second-grader Beckett Navratil, 7, helps plant a butterfly garden at St. Margaret Mary School, joining a national effort to provide habitat for monarch butterflies.
http://www.omaha.com/news/education/students-dig-in-to-provide-food-habitat-for-monarch-butterflies/article_36dcef9c-49de-5844-985a-1adf7e8d35a6.html
POSTED: TUESDAY, MAY 26, 2015 12:30 AM
By Julie Anderson / World-Herald staff writer
About 30 students and 10 adults fanned out across a terraced slope behind St. Margaret Mary School last week, digging holes next to color-coded flags and tucking more than 200 matching plants into the ground.
A week before, another group of students and volunteers dug and planted at St. Albert School in Council Bluffs.
The new plants at both schools have the same purpose: to attract butterflies — and monarchs in particular.
The key feature in both gardens is milkweed, a plant that provides the only food for newly emerged monarch butterfly larvae, an iconic species that has struggled in recent years.
FULL story at link.
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The increasing awareness of the decline of the monarch butterflies made me more aware of the increasing lack of milk weed in pastures and meadows, including my own, which are not treated with any oregano-phosphates of any kind. I wonder why the milk weed has gone. There may be a constellation of reasons, herbicides killing the plants, insecticides killing the pollinators and/or new agricultural cultivation practices. I left out climate change but that may be a factor. The seeds a propagated by the wind which has not changed much over the years.
This leaves me with the question of why the near lack of milkweed in my area. No milkweed no monarchs. I did see a faux monarch yesterday, a viceroy.
but no monarchs in the past couple of years:
The look very much alike but notice the black line running across the rear wing on the viceroy that is missing on the monarch.
