World of Good, Monarch Butterfly Style

When I was a boy living in Oklahoma, I remember a year when a huge cloud of monarch butterflies flew across the Air Force base where I was living. When I say huge, I mean that whole trees were coated with monarchs, as if the trees' bark had come to life and sprouted gorgeous orange and black and yellow wings. It was a sight I'll always treasure.

Renee over at fefyfomanna turned me on to the Live Monarch Foundation. The Live Monarch Foundation is cool in two ways. First, it works to preserve these beautiful and fragile creatures and second, it gives me an excuse to write a World of Good (WOG) post with photos of monarch butterflies. Why, look! Here's one now!


Live Monarch is a not-for-profit foundation that

• aims to educate everyone in the United States and beyond about habitat loss and what they can do to assist native animals. We have implemented ongoing successful free seed programs and habitat reclamation projects across North America


• is partnering with individuals, groups, schools, places of worship, government and private business to facilitate the success of our programs. Together we produce clear results quickly.

Monarch butterflies live on the nectar of milkweed plants. Unwittingly, developers, homeowners and farmers have replaced much of the milkweed on the monarchs' migration route with other plants, eliminating their only food source.

Each year aproximately 180-280 million Monarchs start migrating, mate, lay eggs along the way and their children continue the round trip. Milkweed is needed along the entire route or they will not survive. It takes more than one milkweed plant for each surviving adult due to natural predators. That is an enormous ammount of milkweed! Most North Americans were very lucky to have seen even one Monarch Butterfly over the past few years.

Milkweed is an attractive plant. Talk about something that's easy to do for the environment! Just plant a few milkweed.
In other WOG posts, we've looked at saving the world in various ways, some of them very difficult. In this one, the solution is so easy that there's no reason not to do it. Plant a few milkweed. If you don't want to make a donation, they'll send you the seeds for free. If you want to make a donation, it's about the cost of a Starbucks coffee. How hard is that? They're even on the Internet! Here's the link now!


I'm in for $13 and 10 plants. Butterflies are groovy, man. How can I listen to this blog's theme song (The Monkees' For Pete's Sake) again and not support the monarchs?

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