A Monarch's Viewpoint

Yesterday, I tore out of my first home and ate it. The ivory colored egg I came out of served as a nutritious first meal. I did not know my mother, or what a mother is. I looked around and saw an orange flying creature with black stripes cutting through its wings and white speckles lining its edges. This creature flew past another one of its kind. They danced together in the air and settled down onto the ground beneath my plant. Once they left each other, one of these creatures flew onto my plant and layed a dozen or so eggs on a nearby leaf. These eggs were much like the one I climbed out of, except they were a more brilliant white. I gained a sense of what my life was to be like. I climbed onto the leaf I was left on and began to eat that too.

Over the next few days, I realized that I must grow as quickly as I can to avoid being eaten by the other caterpillars. Our food source is limited. The use of pesticides have killed off our homes and made parts of them poisonous to us. Across the road from me you could see a milkweed plant that has been sprayed with pesticides. There are eggs to never hatch laid upon it. There were dead caterpillars on the ground beneath the milkweed.

If our food source grows too low, we are known to cannibalize our own. I’ll keep in mind the tiny caterpillars that hatched out of the eggs from the other day, they would probably be an easy target. I eat on the milkweed plant for the next two weeks, growing and growing. The milkweed plant is my entire life and all that I know right now. The other plants do nothing for me. These plants are the only ones that are nutritious enough for me. They also come with the added bonus that the plant is poisonous to many of my predators. The cardiac glycosides that I eat do not affect me, but birds that have tried to eat my kind, find that their hearts and bodies weaken and may give out.

Now that I had fattened myself up enough for the next phase of my life I crawled off my plant for the first time. I traveled only about ten feet over the ground before climbing my way up onto a nearby porch and onto a beam. The people at this house did not spray my patch of milkweed with pesticides. I was clearly not the first caterpillar to make their way onto this beam. It is littered with chrysalises. Some of them were empty, others were in different stages of their maturity. I hunkered down and suspended myself from the beam and curled into a J shape. I began to molt out of my skin.

I became a green chrysalis with a gold line left from where my skin finally dropped from my body. The outside of my chrysalis is my only protection from the world. Over the next week, my bright green form will darken. Onlookers will see the orange and black design of my wings through my chrysalis case. Some of the others will also darken in color, but into shades of rotten greens and browns. They will not hatch. They died in their pupa. Maybe they were affected by parasites or pesticides.

I crawl out of my chrysalis. I do not look like the Monarch butterflies I saw flying around after I first crawled out of my egg. My wings are wet and shriveled up. They must dry out before I take my first flight. There is another butterfly down the beam from me. Its wings are dry, but still shriveled. Parts of its wings are missing and deformed. It will never be able to take flight. Maybe this was the result of the pesticides it consumed during its time as a caterpillar.

My wings are finally dry. I take flight, leaving my unfortunate friend. I fly past the milkweed patch I grew in and down the street. I stop at the flowers and drink their nectar. Eventually I will see another Monarch that I can mate with. She will lay her eggs on a nearby milkweed plant. We will both fly our separate ways and continue this for a few weeks. She will die after she has laid all her eggs.g I will die after I have finished mating. I will fly to the ground and stay there until I decompose and am incorporated into the ground.

Hopefully my kind will be able to continue this cycle. Maybe people will stop destroying our host plant to make room for their pristine, but boring yards. Maybe pesticides will no longer be used to stop our habitats from popping up. Then, maybe the Monarchs will fill the sky again and a child can look out their window and see orange butterflies dancing in the air.

-Georgeanna Randall