Cape May Diaries
20- The trouble with monarchs
Cape May is full of magic – that sense of surprise when we turn our gazes and discovered new adventures.
In later years coming here, we always looked back at 1990 as the year of the monarch butterfly, that time when a wave of heat rolled over the state sending temperatures soaring into the 90s and we were greeted by the delightful shock at finding thousands of orange and black monarch butterflies filling the air, floating up and down the promenade, the streets, the sidewalks in a remarkable dance. It was a ballet that featured butterflies leaping from lip of golden rod and into the center of our hearts as we strolled.
An old friend and master gardener, Edna Duffy, later told us the tale of the Monarch – which she retarded as truly regal among butterflies. She could not talk enough or watch her favorite winged creature long enough and she had dedicated a large part of her spare time to their upbringing.
She was a regular Johnny Apple Seed of butterfly gardens who traveled the state establishing neighborhood gardens that would attract these creatures and provide food for them along their long road south each year. While New Jersey could boast of nearly 150 different varieties of butterfly, the monarch dominated Duffy’s heart like no other. She glowed with special pleasure when we asked her about how monarchs came to populate Cape May.
“Monarchs migrate from Canada to Mexico,” she told us, although because the butterfly had only a life span of a few months, these trips required several generations to accomplish. This meant they had to stop over at various places to lay eggs and hatch them before flying on. One such stop over, Duffy said, was Cape May, where they settled into tree crevices, eves of buildings and other places.
“The warmer the temperature, the more easily they find they can fly,” Duffy said, explaining why we had seen so many our first year when temperatures had exceeded 90 degrees and why the numbers fell by the mid-1990s when we were greeted by temperatures more typical to the season. “They need temperatures from 85 to 100 to fly.”
Yet Duffy said there were other reasons for the decline. A blight struck in the early 1990s that threatened to wipe out the species entirely.
The population would also suffer significantly from the intensive spraying in other parts of the state against West Nile virus. The same agents that killed mosquitoes would kill the butterfly.
Naturalists at Cape May Point countered a mere 600 during a certain period in 1992, and while the number had climbed back up to the more normal 16,000 by 1999, the grand dame of butterflies had suffered the wrath of the U.S. Department of Agriculture whose bureaucrats blamed the butterfly for the government’s failed anti-erosion efforts.
The monarch, the government claimed, devoured golden rod which had been planed to secure the beaches. So the not-so-brilliant scientists in their employ proposed outlawing butterfly hatching, one of the methods naturalists had used to help restore the nearly endangered species.
The government even threatened to ban the shipping of monarchs across state lines. This put the act on the same level as drug smuggling and creating a new prohibition to which the Coast Guard and other military forces might be brought to bear. This, of course, only shaped visions of butterfly smugglers prowling off the coast of Cape May the way alcohol smugglers did during the 1920s with bathers on the beach watching flashes of gun fire as butterfly breeders brought their nasty cargo to shore. The Department was so adamant in preserving milkweed, they threatened to impose a $250,000 fine for dealing in what they now called "contraband" and a $50,000 fine on anyone who travels across state lines to release a butterfly.
Some years later, a government report showed the butterfly flap was something of a miscalculation and that the most significant threat to beaches and the state’s environment was overdevelopment.
With no doubt as to which side of the controversy she was on, Duffy suggested the government outlaw bulldozers which she claimed did more damage to the environment than any single invention created by human kind, an invention that allowed developers to move mountains in their zeal to create more suburbs and more shopping malls.
“Leave the butterflies alone,” she warned.
In Duffy’s glowing vision, the monarch maintained much of the ancient magic that had given them mythological status.
“Few living things so impressed people as much as the transformation from caterpillar to butterfly,” she said.
Pitny the Elder, a naturalists of Ancient Rome, claimed caterpillar were born out of the morning dew.
While Duffy admired the monarch’s great beauty, she was most impressed by their ability to survive in a Darwinian world where only the fittest are supposed to survive.
In some ways, it might be said the monarch uses chemical warfare against its most ardent enemy, the birds.
“The monarch eats milkweed,” Duffy said. “Milkweed is poisonous to birds. So birds learn not to eat the monarch butterflies. A bird might eat a monarch once. But never again. They get very sick."
Yet science nor Duffy could quite explain how the monarch’s had invaded our lives, and how much we needed to find their magical presence each time we came south to Cape May – the matter becoming one of superstition with us, a sign of potential peace and prosperity in our lives for the upcoming year if they were here when we arrived.
Each year, my wife did her own unofficial count as we strolled through the streets and along the beaches, this serving as a barometer of fortune that had no basis in fact or science only feeling.
One year, we came upon the church on Washington Street Mall just in time to witness one of the latest trends in marriage ceremonies. We were puzzled by the fact that a number of the wedding guests stood on the steps of the church holding small cardboard pyramids. Thinking this was some sort of Masonic ritual, we stopped to watch. We soon learned the error of our ways when the bride and groom appeared. Instead of throwing rice or confetti, the guests opened the boxes, out from which swarms of dancing, prancing monarchs flew. For me it remains one of the remarkable moments in Cape May magic.