From The Editor: Channeling Elizabeth Hunter - Time Flies, Monarchs Should Too

Our former columnist’s lifelong love of the magical migrating butterflies is, well, an inspiration.

It is certainly not a unique perception that as we get older the years move along ever faster, even if each still has 365 days and includes only one each of the holidays that rush upon us more quickly with each passing year.

Poignant among those wait, it can’t be that long since perceptions is the fact that this magazine’s former long-time columnist, Elizabeth Hunter, contributed her last column to these pages in the November/December 2014 edition, five years ago as I write this.

(For those of you who were reading us then and miss Elizabeth’s heartfelt writing as much as we do, her updates via the phone are always in the realm of celebration—of things like a World Series championship for her beloved Boston Red Sox, or a glorious mountain-top hike on a crisp fall day, or a day of productive weeding on the North Carolina mountain farm where she still lives.)

And perhaps most pointed among the many gentle lessons Elizabeth taught us are those she imparted about monarch butterflies, based on a love that began as a child so obsessed that beginning at about age 10, she became part of a monarch-tagging project conducted through the University of Toronto. She became an expert netter, and even better at bringing home caterpillers, “watching them eat and pupate, then waiting for them to emerge so I could watch their maiden flight.”

Jump forward in time to her move from New England to the North Carolina mountains in 1981, when she began her annual September immersion in that state’s part in the monarch migration south to trees in the mountains near Mexico City, Mexico.

By 1996, in one of her many columns about monarchs, Elizabeth wrote about the wonder that those butterflies become near-dormant during their Mexican over-wintering, then, in spring, undertake their migration back north. Monarchs, by the 10s of millions, thus fly for some 2,500 miles between their fall and spring trips; but then on the way back north lay their eggs on the first emerging milkweed plant they find, and die.

That same year, Elizabeth began a pattern in echo of her childhood—going outside and finding caterpillers in the summer and carefully nurturing them in a 10-gallon terrarium full of milkweed stalks and twigs until they carried out the anguish-filled process of finding a spot to undergo metamorphosis into chrysalis and, in another couple of weeks, butterflies ready to fly south toward Mexico.

In her last column, “For the Wild World,” Elizabeth again touched on the monarchs and, noting both the stunningly decreased butterfly populations and the too many mowed-down Southern mountain milkweed patches, recounted telling an interested couple about how they could help: Find some milkweed that is producing pods, and at the point where they are bursting open, take some home and empty their contents into a grocery bag. Then, “close the bag around your wrist, rub the seeds and fluff together, shake the bag so the seeds fall to the bottom, then cut an opening in one corner and pour the seeds out. Take them outside. Scatter them where you want milkweed to germinate next spring. Don’t keep them in the house over the winter. The seeds need what nature provides—periods of cold and moisture—to germinate.”

An undertaking, should you wish to carry it out, that must await the passing of two calendar seasons and the ripening of a third.

But here, via the magic of the internet that did not exist in Elizabeth’s childhood, nor during many of the years of her sending us wonderful columns, is a shortcut: Pay a visit to saveourmonarchs.org to buy seeds or to make a donation, perhaps in Elizabeth’s name. I did so today.

The story above appears in our January/February 2020 issue. For more like it subscribe today or log in to the digital edition with your active digital subscription. Thank you for your support!