Nebraskaland

APRIL 2015 • NEBRASKAland 35 or six years later that the [monarch] population was going down." In 2005, Taylor started the Monarch Waystation program with the goal of creating small patches of milkweed and other pollinator habitat in home gardens and public parks across the monarch's range to ensure at least some would find places to lay their eggs. Taylor expects the program will hit 10,000 waystations this year, but that is only scratching the surface. "We need 9 or 10 million of those things to really restore habitat," he said. So he and others at KU have developed other programs, including Bring Back the Monarchs, a nationwide program aimed at restoring 20 milkweed species for monarch caterpillars and other wildflowers for adult butterflies and other pollinators. The program will provide free milkweed plugs to schools and nonprofits who want to help the cause. A spinoff of that program, The Milkweed Market, began in 2013 and is collecting milkweed seeds from across the country, raising plugs in a nursery and selling those plants back to gardeners in the region they came from. This year they expect to sell more than 100,000 plugs. Others are promoting the need to plant milkweed and other wildflowers to help stem the decline in pollinators. On a small scale, "guerilla gardeners" are creating balls of mud, clay and milkweed seed and tossing them out on public lands and road ditches to help propagate the species. Bigger efforts include the Monarch Joint Venture, a group of state and federal agencies, non- governmental organizations and academics that is working to conserve the species through the North American Monarch Conservation Plan, created in 2008 by many of the same people and their counterparts in Canada and Mexico. The Center for Biological Diversity, Center for Food Safety, Xerces Society and Dr. Lincoln Brower, a monarch researcher, filed a petition with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service asking that the Monarch be given the protection of the Endangered Species Act. The service announced in December that such protection may be warranted, and initiated a year-long review process to determine whether it will be listed or not. While he believes it could be soon if the continued loss of habitat isn't stopped, Taylor doesn't think the monarch is currently threatened or endangered, and isn't sure listing it as such would help. The problem – habitat loss – spans the continent, and a program to solve it would be "extraordinarily large." "The question is, what is it going to take and who is going to step up do it," Taylor said. "This is one of those all- hands-on-deck-sort of situations." Taylor said it will take help from private citizens, the agricultural community, and park and highway managers to stem the tide. "Basically we have to look at every landscape out there and ask 'can we put milkweed in that habitat?' "The problem we've run into with monarch butterflies is we've created these huge holes in their environment. We've created this incredibly fragmented landscape out there and eliminated milkweed in huge areas of the country, and now the question is how can we address this. Milkweed is not that hard to bring back. It can be done." And if that can happen, the monarch migration, one of the world's great wildlife spectacles, will continue. As will the insect's uncanny ability to teach school children the magic of metamorphosis. In the fall, milkweed pods open and the wind will catch the silky parachutes on the seeds and carry spread them throughout the countryside. PHOTO BY JOEL SARTORE

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