Monarch Chronicles

"I'd sooner exchange ideas with the birds on earth than learn to carry on intergalactic communications with some obscure race of humanoids on a satellite planet from the world of Betelgeuse." – Edward Abbey, from Desert Solitaire









One of the things that I've learned this summer as a citizen scientist for the Monarch Monitoring Project is that you have to be careful getting to know your prairies, for once you do you will ask a very simple question: why aren't there more and why aren't they everywhere? You become attached, so to speak, to the biotic community, how the broad looking tangle interweaves clearly above ground but invisibly under.  How thistle and bee balm heads, the brown-eyed and purple prairie clover, the blazing star and compass plant serve as a veritable playground for bees and butterflies.  You learn that the fear of the perceived thicket of prairie is nothing that can't be overcome by long denim and cuffed sleeves, that those bees, when busy, as they always are in prairies, are not one-third as dangerous as you are as you tromp through the milkweed leveling stems in your path. As you follow your transect through this now unfortunately exclusive kingdom, preserved by not a little

Albany Wildlife Area

effort, and set yourself in the very middle of the shoulder high foliage, you are not of a separate piece, but of it, another color, another long stem wobbling in the wind.  The wind that grooves through the sumac nearby is not a foreign sound but built there inside the mind merely waiting to be uncovered.  How the red-wing plays sentry at is chosen outposts is nothing more a slight warning against trespassing, the very instinct that, no matter how hard we try, can't rid ourselves of as we move around our own yards and wonder where those fresh people tracks come from across the mowed grass. You come to love the sun again, as hot as it might be, trapping in the sweat from the long sleeves, because it dries out the air and leaves the mosquitos back into the depths of the forest underbrush across the highway road.  And if you let yourself stand there in the center of the tall prairie long enough, eyeing the horizon for the incidentally flying Monarch, another rush might run up through you that feels something like the history of land and there you will see the hands of the pioneer thinking many of the same things but for toil not observation.  To some degree, then, the prairie is everything that was or can be. The only thing lacking is either no human feet or a voice if need be.