insects – Urban Bestiary

Today is National Flight of the Monarch Day! Here is the official proclamation, (complete with whereas and therefore … who speaks or writes like that??):

WHEREAS: Monarch butterflies are one of the most iconic and cherished insects in North America. Their epic 5,000-kilometre migration from eastern Canada to the forests of central Mexico begins in late August each year. In 2013, the eastern population of monarch butterflies dropped by 95 per cent, the smallest recorded population since the mid-1990s. Since 2013, the population has rebounded, thanks in part to the collective efforts of thousands of individuals, groups and communities across Canada, but the monarch’s future remains in serious peril. Flight of the Monarchs Day is an opportunity to celebrate the growing movement to protect monarch butterflies and the astonishing phenomenon of their migration as their epic journey southward begins.

THEREFORE, I do hereby proclaim August 22, 2020 as Flight of the Monarch Day.

In Wild City, Doug Bennet & Tim Tiner write: “Monarchs employ the same strategy as migrating hawks, spiralling upwards on warm columns of rising air, called thermals,climbing up to 1500 metres (5,000 feet), then gliding in the wind until they hook on to another thermal. By early November, often hundreds of millions of the orange wind-riders from all over eastern North America converge on about a dozen volcanic mountains in central Mexico’s Sierra Madres. Yet none of has ever made the trip before.”

As part of the City of Toronto Biodiversity Series of booklets, the city published Butterflies of Toronto – A Guide to Their Remarkable World. The following are excerpts from the guide:

“Monarchs in southern Ontario have two or more generations each year, with the adults living about 30 days. However, late summer adults emerge in a state of suspended reproductive development known as “reproductive diapause.” These are the true migrants that can live up to nine months, reaching the wintering sites in Mexico, maturing over the winter months and beginning the northward journey to the southern U.S. in mid- to late February.”

“Female Monarchs generally lay a single egg on the underside of a milkweed leaf, probably laying 300 to 400 eggs over the course of their lifetime. It is simply remarkable that Monarch caterpillars can feed on milkweed plants. Milkweed has evolved certain traits to protect it from becoming insect food. It has a bed of prickly hairs on its leaves that a caterpillar must remove before it can puncture the plant. If the caterpillar isn’t careful, the milky latex that oozes from the puncture can entrap and kill it. Finally, cardiac glycosides within the leaf are toxic to most insects, but Monarch caterpillars are able to redeploy the plant’s toxins for use in their own defense, retaining them in their body tissues even throughout the pupal and adult stages.”

You can read the complete Butterflies of Toronto guide here.

A female Common Whitetail Dragonfly. Photo by Heather Kelly.

When I worked with the Canadian Aboriginal Festival and Pow-wow in Toronto many years ago, I was very fortunate to work with an Indigenous woman named Ilona Stanley. Ilona told me that dragonflies symbolize that all things are possible, and she gave me a beautiful birchbark biting in the shape of a dragonfly. The birchbark is framed in silver, on a tan leather cord to go around the neck.

I think of Ilona every time I see a dragonfly. She appears in a poem and small book art piece I made, which you can check out here if you’re so inclined.

Ilona was Ojibwe from Waywayseecappo First Nations in Manitoba, and one of the last remaining birchbark biting artists in the world. She was selling her art in the marketplace at the Festival the year that I met her. Sadly, Ilona passed away not long later, in 2007. Her birchbark bitings and other art works are in private and public collections worldwide.

I’ve since read online that dragonfly symbols often signify swiftness, as well as transformation, the constant process of change, and rebuilding after hardship. I read somewhere that “To wear the dragonfly symbol is to encourage forward movement.” I particularly like this concept right now, as we are 5 months into the pandemic, and at a turning point as we prepare for life this autumn.

Dragonflies have been on earth for more than 300 million years.

There are more than 5,000 species of dragonflies in the world, and approximately 150 different dragonflies in Ontario. The one I photographed on the East Don Trail / Moccasin Trail Park in Toronto looks to me a female Common Whitetail. (I used Ontario Nature Magazine’s online resource to look it up.)

Thanks to their two sets of wings, dragonflies are phenomenal at flying. They can fly straight up, down, backwards, upside down, and hover – and they can go more than 50 km/hour!

If they can’t fly, they’ll starve because they only eat prey they catch with their feet while they are flying. Smithsonian Magazine has written that the flight of the dragonfly is so special that it has inspired engineers who dream of making robots that fly like dragonflies.

According to Wild City by Doug Bennet and Tim Tyner, most dragonflies names come from how it lays its eggs. There are skimmers who skim waters surface dropping their eggs to sink to the bottom to hatch. Darners slice open stems of water plants just below the surface and lay their eggs inside the plant. “Spiketail dragonflies swiftly dunk into the shallows to inject one egg at a time into the bottom, while in weedy waters, basket-tails drop just one big pay load of eggs, which are string together, and become strewn over submerged vegetation.”

Females can lay from 500 to more than 3,000 eggs. Dragonfly larvae eat whatever they can find in the water, including mosquitoes, fish, tadpoles, and larvae of other insects. Smithsonian Magazine says that, “at the end of its larval stage, the dragonfly crawls out of the water, then its exoskeleton cracks open and releases the insect’s abdomen, which had been packed in like a telescope. Its four wings come out, and they dry and harden over the next several hours to days.”

Yeah, it basically cracks open its own body and unfolds its new self out. How amazing is that.