the future of the monarch butterfly
which performs the greatest migration of any insect on the planet. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/homero-aridjis/mexico-monarch-survival_b_6501656.html?utm_hp_ref=world
I wrote about the race to find the wintering grounds of the monarchs, which Homer Aridjis recounts, in Vanity Fair http://blog.dispatchesfromthevanishingworld.com/?p=3727
Today, the milkweed in North America’s heartland is being snuffed by pesticides. Only three million monarchs made it to the volcanoes of Michoacan, Mexico, …Read More
appeal to three presidents to save the monarch butterfly gets promising response
Betty Aridjis writes :
Our letter addressed to Presidents Obama and Peña Nieto and Prime Minister Harper received excellent coverage in the Mexican and international media, and we were successful in getting the Monarch butterfly on the North American Leaders’ Summit agenda.
Here is the relevant paragraph from the joint statement released at the end of the …Read More
The Skipper and the Dam
New Yorker, Dec 1st, 1986
BECAUSE California is such a crazy mosaic of habitats and plant communities, many of the nation’s rarest butterflies are found there. Lange’s metalmark, for instance, a fiery-red variety of the normally orange-and-gray Mormon metalmark, lives on the Antioch Dunes, east of San Francisco, and has a total range of only fifty …Read More
The Rediscovery of Shoumatoff’s Hairstreak
Dear Mr Shoumatoff,
I thought you might be interested to see an image of your ‘family’ hairstreak. It was taken on Sunday last at Bluefield’s in Western Jamaica and is the third I have seen in the area since March 2007. This is a new location for it. Most challenging to photograph to say the least …Read More
encouraging little encounters
I finally turned in last Saturday the huge piece I’d been working on for weeks, having hardly any contact with anything except my computer, and virtually no contact at all with the natural world. Spring was arriving without me. I played golf at the San Rafael Golf Club on the Isle Bizard, which is off …Read More
#49: Rhopalocera (butterfly and moth) paintings by Zoe Viles
“One afternoon while sitting in the white-washed stone, restored barn gallery where I had a show a few years ago, I became mesmerized by the efforts of a moth fluttering persistently against a window in its attempt to follow the light. The poignancy of that struggle touched me deeply, as it has so many times …Read More
#30: A Profile of the Lepidopterist Camille Parmesan
By Alex Shoumatoff
A somewhat different version of this appeared in the September-October 2005 Audubon Magazine.
In the l970s I was the resident naturalist at a nature sanctuary in Mount Kisco, New York, an hour north of the city. On our Sunday morning bird walks we noticed species that were unusual in this far north, : …Read More