The Not-So-Constant Butterflies of 2013

Last year, I wrote a blog entitled “The Constancy of Butterflies”, for in 2012, my first year in Texas, that had been stunningly true.  From Jan. to Dec butterflies of one kind or the other had been present, and I was putting that check in the positive column of life in Texas. 

So far, in 2013 it has been a very different story.   The omnipresent Sulphurs have been anything but.  The Red Admirals that covered a plate of mashed banana’s last year could be counted on one hand this year.  The Pipevine Swallowtail is the one butterfly I can still see daily, but again, not in the numbers that were here before.  And we all know the dire predictions going out on the Monarch, so I shouldn’t get my hopes up for too many of them this coming fall.  I think I read the wintering site in Mexico has shrunk to some 3 acres, which is pretty appalling. 

I suppose it makes sense though, drought meant fewer host plants for the larvae of all kinds of insects.  Forest fires surely take out a whole food chain, and then, thanks to Monsanto and the like, not only are your windshields frighteningly clean as you cross country, but collateral damage means the plants around the field, the milkweeds the Monarchs must have, have died along with the “weeds” in the field.

Last year, the outside walls of our house were absolutely coated with hairy caterpillars; some of their shed “hairs” still cling to the stucco.  This year there were almost none.  I had had a “hands off” policy on my entire invasion of 6-legged neighbors.   Many locals were telling me I could spray for katydids, which were also present in plague-like proportions last year, but I had left well enough alone and this year, only a modest amount thrummed from the trees through the spring and now are silent.  Research had informed me they did no harm to the trees, nor were they interested in entering my home and really, pesticides didn’t effect them much, so the live and let live attitude was the right one to adopt.

I have babied my Blue Mist flowers, so loved by the butterflies, through the triple digit heat of summer, hoping that they would be here to provide nectar for the Queens and the Monarchs that fluttered around them last year like some nature commercial.  I guess I shall just have to wait and see now.  And here I am, a certified Monarch Watcher after an afternoon of training.  Perhaps this will be tantamount to becoming a Realtor right before the housing crash.  I hope not. 

OK, Miss Joyful Pat, thanks for the gloomy report.  Really, it was just meant to be an observation.  And perhaps rain will come in 2014 and the story will be a completely different one from this year.  It also is a cautionary tale of thinking you know what to expect in a new location after only one year of observing it.  I guess I could have titled this “Confessions of a Neophyte”.

I wonder what might be going on, insect-wise, in your part of the world?  Feel free to share, for the more that we do observe, neophytes or not, the more we all learn.  Bugs aplenty where you are?  Are the Monarchs passing through?  Grasshoppers and all the singing, chirping, rasping, rubbing insects of fall keeping you awake at night? I would love to know. 

Meanwhile, I will console myself knowing insects have been getting along on the planet for far longer than we have, and, by most predictions, would most likely still be around long after we are gone. And really, didn’t I just hear someone say, “Worry is a waste of the imagination”.  How true.  I shall do my part to appreciate and care for the world around me and leave the “worrying” at the feet of the only One who can do anything about it.