Monarch Butterfly Migration Quotes

Knowledge is the only sword that can cut through harm being done in ignorance.

Trespassing laws bother me. The idea that I can't trespass on private land but private landowners can trespass into my space, by dirtying my air and contaminating my water, has always left me doubting the validity of such restrictions.

The male frogs called, attracting mates to lay eggs and begin another generation. Their calls seemed to be protests, an act of defiance. Even as the walls of development squeezed the life out of Texas, that life called to its doomed future, reminding anyone who would listen that it was their home, too. I listened. With a heavy heart, I wondered how anyone could call such destruction progress.

Distinguishing between correlation and causation is critical to our understanding of the biology and conservation of monarchs and milkweeds. Turning back to our study of chocolate: countrywide spending on science also correlates with per capita income, the latter of which correlates with chocolate consumption (at least in the Western world). Even so, I would happily participate in a controlled study to determine the influence of chocolate consumption on scientific discoveries.

At the time your book was written, the full story of the monarch migration was unknown to humanity." "When did they find it out?" Preston asked. The answer, to Dellarobia's astonishment, was within Ovid's lifetime. He had been just a bit older than Preston when the discovery was announced in the National Geographic, in 1976. A Canadian scientist chased the mystery his whole life, devising a tag that would stick to butterfly wings, recruiting volunteers to help track them, losing the trail many times. And then one winter's day, as an old man on shaky legs, he climbed a mountain in Michoacan to see what must have looked like his dream of heaven... Ovid could still quote passages of the article from memory: They carpeted the ground in their tremulous legions. He said he remembered exactly where he was when he read that article, and how he felt. "Where were you?" "Outside the post office, sitting on a lobster crate. I spent a lot of Saturdays there. My mother let me read the magazines before they went to their subscribers. I was so excited by the photos in that article, I ran all the way down Crown Street, all the way to West End and out a sandy road called Fortuna to the sea. I must have picked up a stick somewhere, because I remember jumping up and whacking every branch I passed, leaving a trail of flying leaves. When I got to the sea I didn't know what to do, so I threw the stick in Perseverance Bay and ran back. It was the happiest day of my life." Dellarobia wanted, of course, to know why. "Why," he repeated, thinking about it. "It was just like any schoolboy. I thought everything in the world was already discovered. Already in my books. A lot of dead stuff that put me to sleep. That was the day I understood the world is still living.

The six seasons in the temperate zone are hibernal (winter), prevernal (late winter, early spring), vernal (spring), aestival (summer), serotinal (late summer) and autumn. I like these nuanced divisions, particularly prevernal and serotinal, because they capture something of the magic of seasonal transitions. In the northern temperate zones, the prevernal marks the time when the sap begins to run in late February and when, in early March, a few patches of snow remain on the northern slopes of hills, but the grass is green on the southern sides. Here in North America, the serotinal season is that marvelous time, in early September, when the monarch butterflies start to migrate, the lakes are still

Scientists have linked this alarming decline in large part to habitat loss. Monarch Watch, the University of Kansas’s education, conservation, and research program, estimates that each day, 6000 acres of monarch breeding habitat in the United States are converted to something else: housing or commercial developments, farms, roads, and other human uses. Even farms, which once invited milkweed to thrive between crops and along farm edges, are changing tactics and destroying milkweed. The presence of milkweed in agricultural fields (between crops and on field edges) declined 97 percent from 1999 to 2009 in Iowa, and 94 percent in Illinois. Each year, the migrating monarchs have fewer places to feed on nectar and lay their eggs. They are losing their habitat, losing their homes. Eviction, extinction.

Being stuck on one side of the river with no options reiterated what I already knew: society tells cyclists we’re not important, that we don’t deserve space. It wasn’t just the lack of options that infuriated me, it was a system that demanded compromise from non-conformists. For me, bicycling was more than transportation. It was my version of praying.

Monarch butterfly (with a brain the size of the head of a pin), three thousand miles from eastern North America to the Sierra Madre mountains in Mexico, even though not a single butterfly in the migration has made the trip before.

Monarch butterflies travel thousands of miles during their migration across North America,

No matter the season, the sight of the dunes rolling into the ocean always awakened Abby's senses and filled her with awe for the cycle of life. She thought of how the horseshoe crabs emerged from Cape Cod Bay each spring to mate and deposit their eggs; how juvenile sea turtles knew to travel to these waters where crabs and jellyfish were plentiful; how monarch butterflies - each of which lived up to only six weeks - managed to transfer knowledge intergenerationally to complete their year-long migration to and from Mexico.

Monarch Watch estimates that each day, 6,000 acres of Monarch breeding habitat in the United States are converted to something else.

We call government support to farmers "subsidies." Support for poor people is instead referred to as "welfare.

When I was young, I would ride my bike until I was lost...the realization that I could get where I was going on my own, under my own power, unclocked a bigger world for me.

If all of us committed to one footprint of land...the world would be a better place.

Every day, I biked for the air, climate, frogs and butterflies, and every day, I was told in so many words that my convictions were crumbs easily swept to the margins.

The (Milkweed) plants sat so vulnerable in ditches, the caterpillars never eating fast enough to keep the milkweed small and inconspicuous. It seemed inevitable that the plants would draw the attention of landowners who were oblivious to the architecture of life, and the monarch's habitat would succomb to mowing.