Life can be about celebrating the small things.
And doing what we can to ensure those small things stick around to continue celebrating.
“You should always have concern for the small things in life because they impact big things,” Gareth Blakesley, operations manager at Lake Katherine Nature Center and Botanic Gardens in Palos Heights, said in discussing the importance of monarch butterflies, the brightly colored insects with a unique migration pattern whose numbers are in huge decline.
“It’s not so much that they’d go extinct, but you’d potentially lose that migration, that natural phenomena, that is a rare thing these days,” he said. “Thousands of butterflies make their way down to Mexico and back up. Somehow the new generations know the way and follow the same routes their ancestors took, sometimes even returning to the same tree.
“If they lose their wintering grounds or if they lose most of their host plants, the milkweed, on the way back up, then you’ve lost a huge thing and we’re in a world where we’re losing lots and lots of things,” he said. “We’re in a crisis of losing pollinators — butterflies, bees and other species. That puts us in a bad situation especially when most of the plants on earth and crops we rely on are angiosperms (flowering plants).”
Sounds a wee bit serious, yes?
But you can do something as simple as planting a seed to help.
Lake Katherine’s Monarch Butterfly Fest is in its 23rd year. But with the monarchs’ recent drop in population — down to 30 million from 20 billion in the past two decades due to habitat destruction — more focus is being placed on conserving them. And it’s seemingly easy to educate and inspire folks to help, partly because the creatures are so pretty.
“Monarch butterflies are a great gateway insect. People are slightly familiar with them, they’re bright and colorful and people like them,” Blakesley said. “Having that charismatic animal, that poster child, encourages people to be interested about other insects and animals in general.”
You can learn about the monarchs — their four cycles of life and their migration by every fourth generation — and journey through the prairie on a “migration maze,” buy milkweed seeds in a new educational tent and walk through a separate tent filled with butterflies while enjoying typical harvest-time festivities at the Monarch Butterfly Festival from 11 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Sunday at Lake Katherine, 7402 W. Lake Katherine Drive in Palos Heights.
Hayrides, face painting, scarecrow making, book readings, canoe and kayak rentals, live animals, a children’s farm, games and crafts and food vendors will be featured at the event.
Admission is $6, free for children 3 and younger. Extra parking will be available at Palos Heights City Hall with a free shuttle to Lake Katherine.
In the spring, Lake Katherine will add native pollinator and host plants to develop a pollinator project on the west side of the 85-acre nonprofit park using a National Fish and Wildlife Foundation grant. For now, folks can see milkweed, a plant with nine species native to Illinois that monarchs lay eggs on, along with goldenrod, asters, meadow blazingstar and other plants whose nectar monarchs are attracted to throughout the prairie and other areas.
For more details, call 708-361-1873 or go to www.lakekatherine.org.
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Vickie Jurkowski is a freelance reporter for the Daily Southtown.