The Urban Pantheist

A monarch rests on the back of our river cooter in the Butterfly Pavilion.

Seems a little cold for 8 foot caterpillars.

Wow, what an unexpectedly wonderful day for urban nature!  As most of you know, I work at a zoo in a major northeastern city.  I was in an area that used to be a waterfowl exhibit that's now closed, treating the water features for mosquitoes (biological controls, insect growth regulator, and pheromone traps).  Almost immediately I encountered the garter snake (Thamnophis sirtalis) pictured two posts ago.  It slithered over a stick, so I was able to pick it up without it biting me, or worse, musking on me.  It struck as fiercely at me as a timber rattlesnake, despite being a pencil-sized predator of slugs.

I delved further into this jungle of concrete and weeds, and found a mallard family with four nearly grown chicks.  They were clearly shocked to see a human in their sanctuary.  It was surely safer for them in an unused part of a zoo, a hundred feet from thousands of people and cars, then it was in any of the nearby city parks.  I found one of my pheromone traps, blown by the wind into the artificial pond, and fished it out.  A plastic container the size of a large mayonnaise jar, it had an amazing array of life within it.  Four water boatmen had swam into it, hunting smaller insects.  I could make out the tiny swimming forms of water mites, and even copepods carrying double saddlebags full of eggs.  I dumped out the creatures into the pond and brought the empty trap back to storage.

On the way I walked through a landscape decorated with huge white spheroids, ranging from the size of softballs to those the size of deflated soccer balls.  These are giant puffballs, Calvatia gigantea.  If they were allowed to grow to maturity their insides would turn into billions of spores, which would puff out of tears in the mushroom's leathery hide when struck by raindrops.  I harvested two of them, for research purposes for the mushroom classes I'm teaching at Drumlin Farm in the fall.  Some of my research will include slicing up one of the mushrooms, frying it and eating it.  I must ask, lizblackdog and gwenhyffar, how do you cook and season these beasts?

Finally, as I went back to my storage area, I moved some equipment and turned up a yellow, white, and black striped caterpillar.  Such a striking and beautiful thing, but it was on a piece of metal.  "You belong here, little one," I said, as I lifted it up and placed it on a milkweed plant growing out of a crack in the asphalt.

Photo by urbpan. Location: Olmsted Park, Boston.

Urban species #199: Monarch Danaus plexippus

Of the dozen or so species of migratory butterflies in North America, the monarch is certainly the most well-known and popular. Seven states claim it as the official State Insect, second only to the introduced European honeybee (12 states). It is an uncommonly beautiful insect, even by mainstream tastes. Its bright orange and black colors reminded the colonists of royalty, though they exist to remind birds that they taste bad. Several species of butterfly have bold colors to warn predators away, and some more palatable butterflies have the same bold colors in imitation of the bad tasting ones. Toxic compounds acquired from their exclusive diet of milkweed, as larvae, give both monarch caterpillars and adults their protective taste. There are many species of milkweeds available to them, including many weedy urban species, and many planted by gardeners who wish to attract butterflies. There exists at least one milkweed, black swallow-wort, that monarchs will lay eggs on, but that the caterpillars are unable to feed on. Fortunately, the adult lays a single egg on each individual plant so there are many chances for the correct plant to be chosen. Currently, the greatest threat to monarchs is the loss of trees in their wintering grounds in California, the American south, and Mexico.


Location: Drumlin Farm.