“Where have those flowers and butterflies all gone
That science may have staked the future on?”
—from Robert Frost’s “Pod of the Milkweed”
The migration of monarch butterflies through New Canaan—and everywhere else along the East Coast—is happening less frequently in recent years, to the point where some are calling the insects’ once widely anticipated journey between the Northeast/Canada and Mexico “endangered.”
The major reason, experts say, is a lack of milkweed, which monarch caterpillars feed on.
“The butterflies can go to all kinds of flowers for nectar, but the caterpillars can only eat milkweed plants. They’re having a hard time with loss of bio-habitat, so we are encouraging people in town to plant these free milkweed seeds,” Susan Bergen, a volunteer for the New Canaan Garden Club, said Tuesday morning from a table inside New Canaan Library.
There, she and Jen Rayher (nee Sillo, a 1994 New Canaan High School graduate), director of membership and volunteers at the New Canaan Nature Center, handed out the seeds (“Got Milkweed?” on the packet) to mark Earth Day here in town. It’s one of several initiatives and events planned by the Nature Center for the next week, which New Canaan’s highest elected official today declared “Environmental Awareness Week 2014Week” (see video below). The seeds are available today at community partners Walter Stewart’s (which has an extensive Earth Day celebration, including giveaways), YMCA, Elm Street Books, library, New Canaan Playhouse, Mrs. Green’s and for the next week at the nature center.
Sponsors include the library, Pesticide-Free New Canaan, New Canaan Departments of Inland Wetlands & Watercourses, Parks, Highway and Public Works, New Canaan Garden Club, New Canaan Land Trust, Chamber of Commerce, Conservation Commission, Saxe Middle School and YMCA.
In the Sturgess Room in the afternoon at the Nature Center’s Visitors Center, about 30 town and business leaders and environmentally minded professionals and volunteers, including nature center staff, gathered for a proclamation from First Selectman Rob Mallozzi declaring this “Environmental Awareness Week 2014.”
Here’s a clip from Mallozzi:
Also speaking were G. Warfield “Skip” Hobbs IV, president of the nature center’s board and the (entirely pesticide-free) Oenoke Ridge facility’s Executive Director Laura Heckman.
Hobbs—who at 7 p.m. Wednesday in New Canaan Library’s Adrian Lamb Room is delivering a lecture, “The Future of Planet Earth,”—wished attendees a “Happy Earth Day” and remarked that it was “very appropriate that we are gathered here at the Nature Center as this is the center for environmental education and outreach for our community.”
Here’s more from Hobbs at the event:
Hobbs also read a proclamation from U.S. Rep. Jim Himes, part of which included these words: “Earth Day is an annual reminder that protecting and preserving our natural resources is both a responsibility we have inherited and a promise we make to future generations of America. If you have climbed Rockies, seen the Mississippi or sailed Long Island Sound, you know that we are uniquely blessed. And thus, each generation of Americans has a special responsibility pass that legacy to the next. We owe a debt of gratitude to all the visionaries who have worked to protect what we have and warned us when short-sighted actions put our precious resources at risk.”
In its way, the milkweed seed giveaway captured the spirit of much of what all speakers had to say. The major reason for the loss of milkweed for monarch butterfly caterpillars is a loss of bio-habitat through development and herbicide use.
“They [monarch butterfly caterpillars] also migrate to Mexico, and they’re having problems because they migrate all along the way, and need to have access to milkweed plants every time they breed,” Bergen said. “They have about five flights a year. They start out in Mexico, they end up in northern New England, and the ones in northern New England fly all the way back to Mexico. And they need to stop and have nectar plants but they also need a place to lay their eggs.”