The Pollinator Meadow Movement

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We almost completely wiped out one of the most spectacular animal migrations on the planet just to make our roadside ditches look a little bit neater.

The monarch butterfly operates on a deeply fragile, ancient biological contract. To complete their massive, multi-generational journey from the pine forests of Mexico all the way to Canada, they absolutely require one highly specific plant to survive. Milkw**d. It is literally the only desi greenery their hungry caterpillars can safely consume.

But for decades, American agricultural operators and suburban landscape managers waged an absolute chemical war on this crucial native plant. They aggressively viewed milkw**d as just another ugly, stubborn w**d ruining their perfectly manicured lawns and heavily industrialized commercial farming. We drenched the vast Midwest in highly effective herbicides, violently ripping up the exact biological fuel stations these tiny, exhausted insects desperately needed. The iconic monarch population absolutely cratered, dropping into a terrifying, rapid freefall simply because they literally ran out of food along the highway.

Now, a massive financial intervention is aggressively trying to rewrite that deeply broken contract. The National Fish and Wildlife Foundation officially awarded $2.7 million for monarch butterfly and insect pollinator conservation projects across 20 states. They are directly funding intense, restorative baagwani on a massive civic scale. Conservation teams are actively partnering with local highway departments to permanently stop mindlessly mowing the vast stretches of empty roadside dirt. They are aggressively replanting hundreds of thousands of native milkw**d seeds straight into those heavily forgotten spaces.

But here is the wild, completely unintended biological bonus of this massive butterfly rescue mission. By aggressively seeding these deep-rooted native milkw**d plants along endless stretches of barren highway corridors, they are accidentally stabilizing thousands of miles of incredibly fragile topsoil. The new, dense root networks are violently gripping the loose dirt, instantly stopping severe erosion and actively filtering toxic motor oil runoff before it can wash into local farming aquifers.

Grants planted. Milkw**d rising. Monarchs returning.

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Monarch-butterfly populations in North America have long been decreasing—but there’s “reason to hope that there may still be a pathway left for saving the monarchs and their migration,” Vann R. Newkirk II reports. https://theatln.tc/q0S4cU7X

“Over the past half century, the lands that the monarchs traverse have become more hostile to them, a result of development and herbicides, global warming and organized crime, all of which have put the future of that migration in doubt,” Newkirk writes.

But recently, “there’s been good news: Population estimates, after a long march downward, have been increasing for the past two years. This stabilization appears to be connected at least in part to efforts to save butterfly habitats in Mexico, the United States, and Canada.”

The monarch persists partly because of the dogged work from its human partners, but mostly, “the monarch persists because life’s job is to live; because within those thimble-size bodies hides a dynamo of survival that puts our most incredible machines to shame,” Newkirk argues. “The more we learn about the butterflies, the more we understand how extraordinary it is that they have so far beaten the odds we have stacked against them, and how forbidding those odds remain.”

At the link, Newkirk details his experience tracking three butterflies on their migration journey—and reports on the efforts to save the monarch population and the challenges they still face:

📸: Ana Hop

When the Echinacea (Purple Coneflower) goes from its show-stopping display, to seed-heads, what do you see? Stop a moment a gaze upon those prickly domes.
Ah-ha! A goldfinch is feasting with glee.
Yes, we can trim these perennials back for a second blush of blooms. But how could one not leave bunches of munchies for the birds?

So delighted to share YEAR FOUR of the Pollinator Meadow installation at Church of the Good Shepherd, Episcopal, Decatur, AL!
It is full of all types of blooms, including including lots of Echinacea (Purple Coneflower) and MILWEED!

Let’s keep growing and saving Milkw**d, the ONLY food source for the Monarch Butterfly.
This location is especially important, being the southern-most spot for the Appalachian Monarch Butterfly Migratory Population.
If we fail them here, that whole population collapses.

Photo credit: Janice Barrett

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North America has two migratory monarch populations: eastern and western monarchs. Each fall, North American monarchs travel from their summer breeding grounds to overwintering locations. East of the Rocky Mountains, monarchs travel up to an astonishing 3,000 miles to central Mexico, whereas the shorter migration west of the Rockies is to the California coast. There is evidence of some interchange between the eastern and western populations, perhaps when individuals cross the Rocky Mountains, when butterflies fly from the western U.S. to the Mexican overwintering sites, or when butterflies from the Mexican sites fly into the western U.S.

In addition to the eastern and western populations, a small, non-migratory population has long inhabited southern Florida. The resident population receives an annual influx as individuals from the eastern population pass through on their fall migration.

There is still much to learn about monarch populations and migration. You can help scientists gather data by reporting your sightings to JourneyNorth.org

It’s that time of year - MOSQUITO SPRAYING!

There is no such thing as “mosquito spray”. It is an indiscriminate biocide. You can get on your city’s “no spray list”. We’ve been on our city’s for over 3 years.
In Decatur, AL it is the Street Department. The folks who take care of this are very kind. You just have to tell them you have a bee habitat. They will specifically put you on “no spray” for bees. Other pollinators are not the lever. Now, are we technically bee keepers”?
One need not get into whether or not we tend to hive boxes. We keep bees.
Your neighbors on both sides will then be on “no spray list”
Again, department folks who handle this are very kind.

(256) 341-4743

Street Department The Street Department is responsible for the maintenance of streets, curbs, gutters, and drainage ditches.

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Illinois just turned its highway system into a monarch butterfly migration corridor. And it did it by stopping something it was already paying to do.
For decades, the Illinois Department of Transportation spent roughly $50 per mile per mow — repeated multiple times per season — to keep highway roadsides cropped short, uniform, and ecologically useless. Sixteen thousand miles of publicly owned land, running through every county in the state, maintained at public expense to support exactly nothing. No birds. No bees. No butterflies. Just short grass and a mowing bill.
The Roadside Monarch Habitat Fund changes that math by redirecting the logic entirely. Instead of spending money to suppress native plants, Illinois is now issuing grants to plant them — specifically milkw**d and native wildflowers along state highways, targeted at the counties that fall along the monarch migration corridor cutting through the heart of the Midwest every August and September.
Look at what's in this photograph and understand what it means geographically. That's swamp milkw**d (Asclepias incarnata) in full pink bloom — the high-moisture milkw**d species that thrives in Illinois's wet roadside ditches where common milkw**d can't establish. The yellow explosion beside it is goldenrod (Solidago spp.) — one of the most important late-season nectar sources in the entire eastern United States, producing the high-calorie fuel monarchs need to build fat reserves for a 1,500-mile flight to Mexico. And there are three monarchs in that frame, working the flowers in the last light of the afternoon, with flat central Illinois cornfields stretching to the horizon in every direction behind them.
That context matters. Illinois is 75% corn and soybeans — 26 million acres of the most intensively farmed land on Earth. Before herbicide-resistant crop varieties became standard in the late 1990s, common milkw**d grew everywhere in that agricultural matrix: field edges, drainage ditches, fence rows, the unmowed margins of every farm. It was the invisible backbone of the monarch migration, distributed across tens of millions of acres, so abundant nobody thought to count it. Between 1999 and 2014, an estimated 850 million milkw**d stems disappeared from the Midwest agricultural landscape — eliminated systematically by glyphosate-tolerant crop systems that let farmers spray entire fields and kill everything that isn't corn or soybeans. The monarch population dropped 80% in the same window. Those two facts are not a coincidence. They are a cause and an effect playing out across an entire continent.
What's left in Illinois is exactly what's in this photograph: the roadsides. The narrow strips of publicly owned land between the pavement and the fence line that the herbicide sprayers can't legally touch. Those strips run the entire length and width of the state, through every agricultural county, crossing every migration pathway. For 25 years they've been mowed into silence. The Roadside Monarch Habitat Fund is the decision that they don't have to be.
The monarchs don't need the agricultural landscape restored — that is a 50-year project. They need a thread they can follow south in September without crossing endless miles of habitat desert. Milkw**d for breeding. Goldenrod for fuel. A continuous corridor they can navigate by instinct and find food along the way.
Illinois is stitching that thread back together, one mile of roadside at a time. The monarchs are already finding it.

It might be tempting to “tidy up” those tall, brown and bent, hallowed-outwildflower stalks. Stop and slow down to the pace of nature. There is hibernation of pollinators hidden in supposed “w**ds”.
Once the temperature is steadily above 50 degrees, clipping and frolicking through your re-emerging meadow is such a delight.
To hold you over, here are a few spring and summer bloom pics:)
Hang in there, pollinator rescuers!