In March of 2015 and 2016, I visited Macheros, a tiny town on the edge of the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve in Mexico, and went up the mountain of Cerro Pelon to see the wintering colonies of monarchs. This year, on March 8, only two days after I visited, a snowstorm hit, damaging many of the trees on the mountains and killing over 6 million butterflies. News reports out this week say that over 7% of the migrating monarch population was lost, hitting hard an already suffering species. The phenomenon of the monarch butterfly migration is in danger, perhaps even peril. I could say I started my summer science project as an antidote to the sadness I felt at this loss, and it has been that. But really, the project came about by accident.

My husband and I were working on a back-breaking project involving a sledgehammer, crowbars, and a slab of concrete that was once the foundation for what was probably a milking parlor on the barn. It had been an unsightly patch of weeds and saplings growing through broken cement, looking like an abandoned parking lot. With just some hard work, one chunk at a time, we would be rid of it. As I pried up a slab to haul to the truck for carrying away, I noticed a monarch drifting over the yard. I dropped my crowbar and chased it down. A female, and in the overgrown lawn she was landing on little starts of milkweed I hadn’t even known were there. The summer before, I’d raised two caterpillars I’d found and released them as butterflies. But I hadn’t found any caterpillars this year—had barely seen any butterflies at all.

Looking carefully at the underside of one the young milkweed leaves, I noticed a pale yellow dot. An egg! I hadn’t known exactly what they looked like before, since they’re smaller than a pin head and my eyes aren’t so good, rendering anything that small into a vague blur. But having just seen the female touch her abdomen to the leaf, I was certain this is what it was. Soon I’d found another, and another, and another. I collected all I discovered and put them in an old fish tank with a screen on top. The next day, another monarch came around, and I picked more leaves with eggs. I bought a big plastic tub to put the second batch in.

First instar caterpillar and US currency of least value

About four days later, they started hatching into what my eyes saw as slightly larger blurs. I purchased some close-up filters for my camera so I could take pictures and zoom in to see the little guys. As they grew and grew, nibbling on milkweed and making it into piles of caterpillar poop (which is called frass, for some reason), I realized things were getting complicated, with hungry caterpillars converting milkweed into stripped stems and frass I needed to clean up. The fish tank and plastic tub seemed perhaps a bit inadequate for the growing bunch. I invested in a couple of mesh butterfly enclosures. Now, about two weeks and many stalks of milkweed later, I have very visible caterpillars who are transforming, gracefully, into chrysalises. In total, if I’m lucky, I may have around fifty by the time this science project completes itself.

Caterpillars raised by hand have a significantly better chance of surviving to butterfly-hood than those fighting it out in the wild. I’m hoping most of mine will be healthy and find their way to Mexico. But I’ll have no way of knowing their destiny or what dent they’ll put in repairing March’s damage.

Caterpillar transforming to chrysalis (third from right)

An egg is a small thing. Had I not seen the monarch visit the young milkweed plants, I would’ve mowed that stretch of grass without knowing what waited in it; I would've destroyed the eggs. A phenomenon is a big thing made up of small things that demand notice but are difficult to see. I can’t help but wonder what I am missing.

(If you are interested in reading more about milkweed and monarchs, see my blog entry from a few years ago, "Traveling Seeds.")

I’ve planted many things in our garden over the years—romaine and oakleaf lettuce, red, green, spotted; purple and yellow and sometimes orange carrots; tomatoes gnarled and smooth; zucchini with tasty blossoms; cucumbers Chinese and Persian and Indian, including one, poona kheera, that looked like a potato; foot-long red beans; arugula; tatsoi; bok choy; komatsuna and mizuna; New Zealand spinach and Malabar spinach and red spinach and regular old spinach; kale; cilantro; dill (which really just plants itself); Asian basil and sweet basil and holy basil; mustard greens; broccoli raab; ground cherries; tomatillos; shiso; culantro; papaloquelite; green and lime green and red chard; Chioggia beets with target-like rings; radishes Japanese and French; wide Italian green beans and tri-color beans; habanero peppers and jalapeno peppers and serrano peppers and tabasco peppers and hot Thai peppers and banana peppers and cubanelle peppers and ancho peppers and sweet bell peppers large enough for a bird to build a nest in; butternut and acorn and delicata and blue hubbard squash; dark drops of eggplant; pumpkins; fingerling potatoes that one summer fed a fury of voles; asparagus; onions; flat Chinese chives; blue stars of borage; sour sorrel; peas sweet and snow; Persian cress; parsley (which travels to hell and back before it finally pops up through the soil). Seeds carry in them dishes from faraway places. Plants emerge from the ground, evocative as recipes, mysterious as maps.

After planting, I hover. Seeds such as radishes or arugula satisfy my impatience, their green cotyledons arriving in two days sometimes. But most take a bit more waiting. I’m always relieved to see that things have sprouted, and worried when they don’t. These seeds are my responsibility, and I hate it when I screw them up. This year an expensive package of ten seeds—my favorite tiny cucumber (the “Rocky” variety)—failed to sprout; seven dollars rotting somewhere in the dirt. I could’ve planted a few quarters in each hole. At least then I could’ve dug them up and used them for something else.

There’s one seed I plant each year that I don’t hover over, don’t even bother noticing which come up, or, for that matter, where. And yet, these seeds are the most fun to sow of all of them: common milkweed. Near our vegetable garden lies a little field of tall grass surrounded by trees we’ve planted to screen the yard. In the summer the pink rubbery flower heads bloom and droop, and in the fall I crack open the dried seed pods with their layers of seeds inside, each attached to a bit of silken fluff. Rubbing the seeds between my fingers, I separate them from one another and free them to the breeze, each floating across the field. I give the dog a stem of pods to grab in her mouth, and she runs through the grass, seeds releasing.

The milkweed is doing well this year, blossoms thickly sweet, but it took me some time to realize that something was wrong. I love the milkweed flowers, but the main reason I plant them is for the butterflies, the orange and black monarchs that drift around the yard and lay their eggs on the plants; milkweed is the only food the caterpillars eat. The milkweed transfers to the butterfly a poison, making it untasty to predators. Standing in the yard this week, watching a different species of orange butterfly drop in and out of flowers, I realized it was mid-July, and I had yet to see a monarch, probably the most recognizable butterfly in the country, an icon of summer.

The monarchs in our part of the country live and reproduce during their migration to northern United States and Canada, laying eggs on milkweed that hatch into caterpillars which develop into butterflies that continue the journey north. The fourth generation returns south in one long trip, where they winter in Mexico before starting back north, following a trail of milkweed blossoms. No one completely understands how they manage this feat, though we take their summertime presence for granted.

Drought certainly has hurt the species. But my beloved milkweed is unloved by farmers, or at least unappreciated, and over the years, increased use of herbicide has eradicated it from soy and corn fields, leaving much of what was once vast areas of monarch habitat—the American middle—less habitable for the butterflies. There’s simply less for them to eat. When I hear “endangered butterfly habitat,” I’m inclined to imagine someone in South America cutting down a rainforest rather than farmers growing corn in Ohio. Blame is one thing that migrates effortlessly.

Yesterday, I finally spotted a monarch, or at least I’m pretty sure I did—large and orange and swaying over the milkweed before disappearing behind the trees.