Dead Butterflies

By Sara Wright

Yesterday I briefly attended the well-advertised (thousands of people) Monarch Festival. Held at our local land trust my purpose was to watch a young neighbor  participate in the final parade.

In the time I spent there I saw adult women dressed in butterfly wings and monarch shirts, both children and adults wearing butterfly antenna created out of pipe cleaners (bought at the festival), children with butterfly tattoos, stenciled monarch caterpillars on clothing. The list goes on. The merchants, and there were many, had a good day and the organization made lots of money.
This a surely a children’s festival! It is also a delightful place to meet friends and to buy many products. There were so many creative projects for young people of all ages to engage in, and I so enjoyed seeing the paintings (thank you Rebecca) for your brilliant art-work.

All the participants seemed delighted with the vendors wares.

Most disturbing to me is that children are being inculcated into the belief that it’s just fine to tag butterflies and that the lives of these insects really don’t matter. All creatures in nature remain less than human, without feelings or sentience. The same old story continued for another generation.
     
I volunteered for this land trust for four years and wrote 50 articles for them during the same period  but have made the decision to stop participating because of monarch tagging.

This practice extends well into September.

Tagging is lauded as a success story.

Why am I so upset? First of all, because these beautiful creatures are treated like a less than human thing.

 Worse, these folks tag the very monarchs that make the arduous trip to the Mountains of Mexico to spend the winter. The ones with these tags are often found dead in Mexico where people are hired to find them. These butterflies are unable to finish their journey north to lay eggs in the spring, the only monarchs who live nine months, and their circle of life has broken. Virtually everyone must know by now that these butterflies are in steep decline.

Western science continues to research the effects of tagging on how the paper tags attached to the hind wing of a butterfly effect the actual life of a monarch.

Good field research takes years but there is enough scientific evidence out there to suggest that these butterflies’ lives are being threatened by this practice. Of course, pesticides may also be a culprit because virtually everyone uses them. Add habitat loss etc. and the reader can draw his or her own conclusions.

Because I have discussed the effects of tagging elsewhere on this blog (and through many publications throughout the country) I will not repeat what I learned, except to add that incoming research is indicating that tagging poses more threats than originally believed to the monarch butterfly.

Unfortunately, only researchers like I am, are willing to dive into more scholarly articles to find out what is really happening.

Although the land trust is bulging with an overly stuffed garden of flowering plants, I saw only one monarch land on a Mexican sunflower as we were leaving.

I stopped to take a picture amazed that the butterfly stayed so long perched on this one blossom. It wasn’t until I looked at my photos that I understood why. This monarch was wearing a tag, and was no doubt recovering from the trauma of being caught etc.

A fitting end to my story.