Perhaps Richard Giles of Alma (letter to the editor) should take a little time to become more informed about the Monarch butterfly’s feeding habits. The adults, on their long-distance journeying, do not require milkweed plants. They get their energy from nectar of many different flowers, or from mushy, rotting fruit. (On the other hand, the milkweed plant, of course, is the sole food that the larva must have.)
A hugely important cause for the catastrophic decline in Monarch butterflies is illegal logging in the mountains of Mexico, as well as occasional adverse cold weather conditions there. But the cutting of their habitat occurs when poverty-stricken locals turn to harvesting timber. And why are incomes declining in rural Mexico? NAFTA? The drug trade? International agricultural cartels? Corruption?
Leaving a few milkweed plants around the edges of a field “to feed the passersby” as Giles erroneously puts it, is only one aspect of a very complex problem!
Karl Dick, Waterloo
Karl Dick