WEST ORANGE, NJ — Last year, the West Orange Environmental Commission did its part to help the dwindling monarch butterfly population by giving out 400 milkweed plants — the only place where adult monarchs will lay their eggs and the only food that monarch caterpillars will eat — to residents, who planted them in their gardens and backyards. This year, the milkweed project is under way again, and on a larger scale.
The commission will soon be offering 36,000 seeds to community members willing to grow milkweed in the name of building up the monarch butterfly population. Commission Chairman Mike Brick said the seeds, which were purchased from the nonprofit Save Our Monarchs Foundation, will be available for pickup by the end of May at a location yet to be determined. They are currently near the end of their 30 days of cold storage required to best germinate, after which township schools and other organizations will place three to four seeds inside papier-mache balls that residents can easily plant.
Once the seeds are ready to be handed out, Brick said he hopes West Orange community members will be just as enthusiastic about planting them as they were last year with the milkweed plants. Millions of monarch butterfly lives depend on it.
“Now there’s this huge awareness that this beautiful species could go extinct,” Brick told the West Orange Chronicle in a May 16 phone interview. “If we plant, as a country, milkweed in the areas that we have control of, then the monarchs can continue to survive.”
The monarch population is indeed in a steep decline compared to 20 years ago, when the insects known for their black-and-orange coloring covered 45 acres of their winter habitat in Mexico; today the insects only cover 10 acres, according to the World Wildlife Fund. And while that number is a substantial improvement from its lowest level ever of 1.66 acres in 2013, it is nonetheless a sign that the monarch is in crisis.
This crisis stems from several roots, including global warming, the conversion of grasslands to corn and soybean cropping, and illegal logging of the Mexican forests to where the monarchs migrate for the winter. But the most detrimental factor affecting the butterflies is the elimination of milkweed due to the herbicide glyphosate, which is found in the popular Roundup weed killer. In fact, Save Our Monarchs reports that the estimated number of milkweed plants has declined by 80 percent due to glyphosate use.
While the United States has vowed to replace 7.5 million acres of milkweed, in addition to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service pledging $3.2 million for monarch-conservation efforts, organizations such as Monarch Watch and the Xerces Society are encouraging people across the nation to plant milkweed to help restore the butterflies’ numbers, allowing the monarchs to repopulate. And Brick said doing so is actually quite simple.
Brick said residents can plant the milkweed seeds in any spot that gets at least a half day of sun. The WOEC chairman advised that the seeds should be well-watered until they sprout two weeks after being planted, at which point residents can begin watering the milkweed at the rate they would any other plant in their garden. Milkweed is also perennial, he said, so community members will not have to worry about replanting them again next year.
Though milkweed is in fact a weed, Brick said residents should not worry about their other plants being intruded upon. He said Eastern swamp milkweed — the species that the WOEC is giving out which is best suited for the monarch’s migratory cycle, unlike the tropical milkweed commonly sold in nurseries — grows rather slowly when it is not near a body of water, and residents can always stop roots from spreading or pull out the plants if they sprout in an unwanted area. Plus, he said, milkweed is not unsightly, as it sports beautiful flowers after a few weeks.
In addition, residents who plant milkweed will likely notice an increase in the number of butterflies visiting their yard, a fact to which Councilwoman Susan McCartney, a WOEC member, can attest. McCartney, who brought the idea of planting milkweed to the commission’s attention after having her First Mountain Preschool take part in the National Wildlife Foundation’s Butterfly Heroes campaign last year, told the Chronicle that she has seen multiple species of butterflies in the area where her students planted the milkweed. This is a good thing, she said, because butterflies help pollinate flowers.
If the WOEC has its way, West Orange may soon be home to many more butterflies soon. According to McCartney, the township has already agreed to allow the commission to plant some of its milkweed seeds on the 6 acres of town-owned open space on Mt. Pleasant Avenue. Additionally, she said she would like work with the Department of Public Works to plant seeds on other pieces of municipal land, such as the perimeter of Degnan Pond and the 5 acres behind the Oskar Schindler Performing Arts Center.
It might not seem like much, but considering how much land is being lost to development around the world, McCartney said, any little thing one can do to help the Earth is important.
“It’s just a simple project that has a great impact,” McCartney said in a May 12 phone interview.
That simple project is about to get even bigger, as Brick said the Pleasantdale Chateau — which donated the 400 milkweed plants to the WOEC last year — is planning to give the commission another 50 to 100 plants from its garden. And with several condo associations and churches already expressing an interest in planting milkweed on their properties, the chairman said West Orange will hopefully have a lot of butterflies soon.
Such a development is “heartwarming” for Brick, who hopes the commission’s efforts will go a long way toward preserving the monarch population. In addition, he said he wants the project to inspire residents to start thinking about how they can help Mother Nature in general.
“There has to be a conscious effort to support the environment in any way possible,” Brick said. “This is a graphic way of saying ‘I care about the environment and I don’t want this species to go extinct.’ And if we do it and millions and millions of other people do it in the country, we can overcome the problems that herbicides create by killing off species that we think are detrimental to our crop-growing but in actuality are indirectly important to our life on the planet.”
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