Celebrating Resilience in the Face of Destruction
A monarch butterfly rests on a milkweed plant. With shredded wings, movement becomes difficult for a monarch; death may soon follow.
Dec. 15, 2023 | Story and Photos by Elise Plunk
This article is part of Atrium’s Winter 2023 issue. To view the print edition online, visit our Issuu here
As autumn stretches into the icy grip of winter, a curious change occurs in Santa Rosa Beach, Florida.
The sky, usually a deep, endless blue, turns orange.
The color comes slowly at first, a hint of warmth scattered among the evergreen pines and palmettos, then it descends all at once, painted on the backs of small, fragile wings that have traveled thousands of miles. In early November, the orange drifts across the coastal town to the steady beat of thousands of Eastern monarch butterflies passing through on their migration south.
Their arrival, the last call for autumn’s warmth as cold fronts arrive and sneak a chill into the seaside breeze of the Emerald Coast, is a cause for celebration. The Flutterby Arts Festival, hosted annually by the Cultural Arts Alliance of Walton County, commemorates the monarch’s resilience and memorializes the wonder it brings to the natural world on its epic journey home.
“It’s something that all humans can watch and relate to, you know, being cocooned and in the darkness before finding your wings, the cycle of life,” said Alyson Longshore, a business owner and vendor at the festival. “It’s really therapeutic to watch that process.”
2022 marked the 30th year of the Flutterby Arts Festival. Families, community members, artists and vendors gathered at Watersound Origins, a residential community in Walton County, Florida, to celebrate. The newly constructed outdoor event space, with wide lawns and a large, wood-trussed pavilion, served as the main location for the festival to mark the butterflies’ passage.
Children painted cardboard wings at the craft tent and learned about the monarchs’ life cycle and favorite plants at the education stall. They beamed at their parents with freshly painted flowers on their cheeks, parading around little pots with milkweed clippings they could take home and plant in their gardens, hoping a traveling monarch would find rest and respite in its nectar.
But the joy of the festival fell under the shadow of a dark realization: The monarch butterfly could be dying.
This delicate orange insect, a migratory subspecies of monarch known by its scientific name Danaus plexippus ssp. plexippus, is already a fleeting creature. Its life cycle lasts only about 24 days in the summer months, when the weather is mild, the food is plentiful and the living is good. Three generations have this short life cycle of two to five weeks, leaving just enough time to mate and lay eggs before they die. The fourth generation carries the hope of the subspecies’ survival.
This winter generation, commonly called the “overwintering” generation, is built to last with a months-long lifespan. But this gift of extra time comes with responsibilities — the fourth generation must travel south, thousands of miles across North America, to regions in California and Mexico for warmer temperatures during the winter months. The hearty winter group hibernates until the warmth of spring and summer seeps back into the north, when they travel once again and lay their eggs along the route back, chasing perfect temperatures.
The odds of survival across 2,000 miles of North and Central America seem virtually impossible. Wings that tear at the slightest provocation and tender bodies so easily squashed under a careless shoe don’t help the butterfly, not to mention highways, semi-trucks and curious housecats.
Climate change and pesticide use complicate the matter even more.
“Its biggest threat is habitat destruction,” said Sarah Steel Cabrera, a University of Florida Ph.D. student and graduate research assistant in the Daniels Lab at the McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity.
Bigger and harsher storms are destroying Eastern monarch hibernation grounds longer into the hurricane season. In 2002, a storm of epic proportions killed “almost 80 percent of the overwintering population,” according to the UN Conservation Convention. And storms like this are becoming even more frequent.
Alongside threats to their hibernation grounds, milkweed plants and shifting ranges could directly affect the monarch and its ability to thrive.
“Its host plants are much more scarce than before due to changes in how we manage agricultural lands in particular,” said Cabrera. Monarch caterpillars feed on milkweed almost exclusively, and adult butterflies lay their eggs on the leaves to give their offspring the best chance at survival.
But milkweed ranges are predicted to shift toward the poles in search of better growing conditions, making the monarchs’ journey even longer and more arduous. Alongside the shifting milkweed ranges, habitat destruction from climate change as well as human agricultural practices and pesticide use on milkweed plants threaten the monarchs’ survival.
Children who attend the Flutterby Festival can decorate cardboard wings at the craft tent with paint and glitter. These colorful cardboard wings lay temporarily discarded while their owners practiced cartwheels in the grass.
At the Flutterby Festival in 2022, children ran around with painted wings, doing cartwheels on the grass lawn and chasing bubbles from colorful wands. In 2021, the Cultural Arts Association installed a more permanent display of sculptures to honor the monarchs’ migration, all themed around the main character of mid-November. The butterfly had more accolades than ever before, but this time, I could count on two hands the number of monarchs I saw pass through the festival named in their honor.
The craft tent felt lonely without them. The education stall and milkweed sprouts seemed arbitrary. The statues erected in their honor felt more like gravestones instead of a celebration of their arrival.
I started to panic, anxiety creeping into my chest as I frantically walked around the festival, searching for more than just a glance of orange. I found nothing on the wind or in the foliage surrounding the event space, but I spotted a booth with flowers, little caterpillars munching on leaves and a chrysalis hanging from a branch.
I walked over to get a closer look and met Alyson Longshore running her booth. Her business, Metamorph Blooms, works to raise monarch caterpillars and reintroduce larger numbers of butterflies back into the wild. Attached to plant arrangements, the chrysalis of the butterfly awaits the day it will open, when the fresh monarch will dry its wings on the leaves before beginning its flight.
“We donate a portion of our proceeds to SaveOurMonarchs.org; we use farm-grown milkweed as our host plant,” she said. “It’s to promote the beauty that they have, but also preserving and protecting.”
Efforts like Metamorph Blooms are plentiful, with the monarch’s beauty a high selling point, but they feel small when placed against the backdrop of larger catastrophe. The ebb and flow of the volatile creature’s numbers in the wild may well turn into a legacy of their mythical good looks, the value of life’s diversity lost in the efforts of too little too late.
The Eastern monarch was listed as an endangered species by the International Union for Conservation of Nature in July 2022 and is scheduled to be assessed for federally endangered status in the United States in 2024.
In the face of all we stand to lose, how do we celebrate?
I grew up in Santa Rosa Beach. At the first Flutterby Festival I ever attended, I sat at a face painting booth getting a bright red flower painted on my cheek, cardboard wings in hand, eyes pointed forward as I focused on staying still. Something soft brushed against my cheek, and I felt a gentle presence. A butterfly had landed on my head, causing small strands of my hair to fall out of my ponytail and tickle my face. The woman painting my face smiled and calmly continued her work.
“That’s good luck, you know,” she told me. “They like you.”
Since then, the monarchs have found me. On my way home for Thanksgiving in 2021, I found one crushed behind the pump at a gas station. It was still alive, but one wing was shredded. It would never fly again, and to a butterfly, stillness is death. I sat and stared for a moment, watching the delicate insect limbs scramble to find a grip on the cold, rusted metal of the gas pump.
I saw the rest of my day planned in my mind: I would drive home, unpack my things, say hello to my family and go to the store to shop for our Thanksgiving feast. I would forget about this unfortunate insect and carry on with my tasks, enjoying time with family and away from responsibilities.
But still, I stared at this butterfly, orange wings bright despite everything it had been through, and I put the gas pump into my tank. I reached for the butterfly and gently shifted its legs onto my hand, cupping my other palm to keep the wind from blowing the frail little thing away.
I set the creature on the passenger seat of my car and drove home, where I searched for what a butterfly could eat. I found a wide hibiscus leaf under pink flowering stems in my yard and set my injured companion there while I went to make sugar water.
Why was I doing this? I knew it was going to die. Even the overwintering generation doesn’t live for very long, and this one was broken beyond repair. I was behind schedule for Thanksgiving shopping. I had things I desperately needed to do. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that I owed this short life something. It had known such hardship in its pursuit of finding its way home to rest, and now it never would.
I couldn’t stop it. I couldn’t turn the temperature back from the heights it was reaching, fend off the monstrous hurricanes. I couldn’t make the milkweed stay where the butterflies’ children could find it. I couldn’t forget the reality that every year at the Flutterby Festival, I saw less and less orange in the sky and on the leaves.
I was scared that little girls who got red flowers painted on their cheeks would never again be blessed by the soft wings of a monarch. I feared losing the luck and life of the butterfly to a demise both of our own making and completely out of my control.
I could make sugar water, but a gentle death, a wide green hibiscus leaf and a final meal is ultimately all I could offer.
At the 31st anniversary of the Flutterby Arts Festival in November 2023, I walked through the artists’ stalls again. Children still ran by with their glittery wings, butterflies painted on their cheeks. The air still smelled like pine needles and grilled cheese; snow-cones still dripped from the hands of those walking by the displays of butterfly-themed paintings, sculptures and ornaments.
But a new kind of joy wove its way throughout the small arts festival this year. The IUCN moved the monarch down from endangered to vulnerable on their extinction risk-rating system in September 2023, citing new predictive models that show the monarch’s population is declining slower than they thought.
While a clear scientific consensus has yet to be settled, and the scientific community generally urges caution about accepting the results of the new study, the stabilizing population numbers signal hope for the migratory monarch, just as the attitudes at the festival did.
Scientists from the University of Florida IFAS gardening booth taught kids how to plant their own milkweed, guiding their hands as they pressed the seeds down into the damp soil. A butterfly garden nearby hosted a handful of monarchs, their wings spread wide as the sun danced across the patchwork of orange and black on their backs.
A tenuous dream crept its way into my mind, a dream of orange wings and blue skies and human beings helping to usher in a different kind of future than the one of heat and loss we had been promised. We could take advantage of the chance to ensure the monarch’s legacy lives on in the creatures themselves rather than just the stories we tell.
Caterpillars create a protective husk called a chrysalis as they transition from one phase of life to another. The flecks of gold on the monarch’s chrysalis is derived from milkweed, the plant they eat as caterpillars.
I came back to the leaf when I was done, setting a shallow dish of sugar water in front of the small, dying creature. Its wings looked like panes of stained glass in a cathedral lost to time, shattered and torn yet beautiful in its reminder of glory. The monarch made no motion toward the dish, and I feared it had already died.
I placed the tip of my finger near its legs, trying for the second time that day to offer all I could to help this creature die softly. A twitch, the smallest motion. Its leg extended to my hand, and I helped it toward the edge of the dish. It tasted the sugar and unfurled its proboscis — a tube often thought of as the butterfly’s tongue — to take a sip.
I smiled. I didn’t cry, though I probably should’ve. I had done what I could do at that moment. All that remained was the joy of knowing that this little life had responded to an outstretched hand and that reaching out again wasn’t as impossible as I had thought.
With uninjured wings, this monarch can take flight and continue its long journey.