It’s a sunny July afternoon, and Grayslake neighbors Annie Lawson and Heather Bauer are standing at the side of Lawson’s home, carefully going through her garden of milkweed plants. Lawson points at what looks like nothing more than a pale speck on the underside of a leaf.
“Here’s an egg,” she says, prompting a gleeful cheer from Bauer.
In a few days, that egg will hatch a caterpillar barely a few millimeters long, which will binge itself on milkweed leaves for another two weeks. After that, it’ll form a chrysalis, a small protective shell, inside which it will be radically transformed. From that shell will emerge a monarch butterfly, an iconic North American butterfly that has faced catastrophic population decline in recent decades.
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Butterfly obsession
Both Lawson and Bauer have small signs designating their homes as monarch waystations, meaning they provide proper milkweed plants, nectar and shelter for monarch butterflies. Bauer, who began raising butterflies about five years ago, was the one who drew Lawson into the hobby.
Today, they admit it’s something of an obsession, with the egg hunt becoming a daily ritual during the hatching season. Bauer has her “monarch mansion,” as the neighborhood children call it — a birdcage where she protects the caterpillars and butterflies before releasing them when they’re ready. And Lawson showed, somewhat sheepishly, her photo diary of her first few years releasing butterflies, where she photographed, named and recorded each one.
For both women, their efforts are a small way to combat the devastation human activity has brought to monarch butterfly populations, including climate change, deforestation and heavy pesticide use.
The monarch butterfly is most renowned for its yearly odyssey. Some will travel up to 3,000 miles during their two-way winter journey, according to Monarch Watch, which provides the waystation signs sitting in Bauer and Lawson’s yards. They travel in giant butterfly masses across the continent to either the coast of California or the mountains of Mexico.
But since the 1980s and ’90s, monarch populations have seen staggering declines. According to the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation, populations in central Mexico and coastal California have decreased by more than 80% and 95% respectively in recent decades. It’s a drop Bauer and Lawson have had to see in their own lifetimes.
“It’s really sad,” Lawson said. “It kind of lit this sense of responsibility in me. How hard is it to plant milkweed?”
Bauer and Lawson explained that native milkweed is critical to the monarch’s lifecycle, acting as the butterfly’s host plant. It’s where they lay their eggs and it feeds them as caterpillars.
“If you don’t have milkweed, you don’t have monarchs,” Lawson said.
Both heavily encourage everyone to plant milkweed and get involved in raising monarch butterflies. Neither claims to be a bug expert, but they argue their lack of expertise actually shows how easy it could be to learn.
“You can go online and read about it and get yourself started,” Bauer said. “As you keep doing it, it gets better and easier.”
It’s also drawn in their neighbors and community, and the two are discussing plans for creating a summer program to get school children involved.
“It’s like this whole other world that you come into,” Bauer said. “When you find an egg, you get excited, it’s like a new baby. Watching them grow is crazy.”