The woods and prairie of the Missouri bluff are full of life—and death. That, of course, is by design. No organism survives forever. The life of some, including many insects, is measured in days. For annual plants, our growing season is six months at best. Burr oaks can live hundreds of years, and though native grasses are perennial, everything but the roots dies away each fall. Each organism, including human beings, returns in its own way to the Earth, our decomposition restoring the minerals and resources we have borrowed for a time.

So death in the woods is not new, and not necessarily a cause for sadness or concern. Frost ends the life cycle for annual plants, and even before frost, tree leaves begin to fall. When fungi grow on an ash tree, I suspect its days are numbered. Many a raccoon fails to make it across the road from Clay Creek to the bluff, but I also find dead animals in the woods, sometimes just feathers or fur and inedible parts of birds, rabbits and rodents that have fed a larger predator, sometimes the decaying bodies of creatures that may have died of injuries, disease or old age.

But now and then I find death that fills me with sadness or anger. Once I found the carcass of a red-tailed hawk, cradled in the jagged top of a rotting cottonwood. I could not reach the hawk for examination, but a natural death on that pinnacle seemed unlikely. I had just read that two men in the service of a local pheasant-shooting preserve had been arrested for shooting protected birds of prey.

This week brought another discouraging find. Passing the pond, I saw something large floating near the north shore. I walked upstream and crossed the creek to investigate. It was what I feared I had seen—a half-submerged whitetail deer. I went home for a rope, paddled the raft out to the carcass and dragged it to shore, then up the hill to where the body can feed coyotes and other scavengers and carnivores without polluting the water. I examined the deer, a young antlerless buck. Just behind the front leg was a half-inch hole. I grasped a hoof and turned the body over. Opposite the hole was a bloody gash, apparently ripped by an exiting bullet.

I do not oppose ethical hunting, and every winter we enjoy venison jerky passed to us by a friend. But our piece of the bluff is clearly marked as a wildlife preserve, no hunting allowed. The pond and the creek are not unusual places for wounded animals to die; they instinctively seek sanctuary and the water that a bleeding animal needs. The pond is a quarter mile from our boundary, but a wounded deer may run that far, so it is quite possible that whoever shot the young buck and failed to follow the trail of blood fired from outside our fence. But what is more disturbing is that I found the carcass on November 17, four days before rifle season began.

There is nothing magical about November 21. A deer shot that day is just as dead. But those who disregard the law and the science behind it to kill animals out of season are among those who give ethical hunters a bad name, like those who kill eagles and hawks and owls, and those who every fall cruise county and township roads, shooting from vehicles and tossing beer cans in the ditch.

I know hunters whose respect for nature and for fellow creatures is similar to mine. One friend, who ranks among the top archers in the state, spent dozens of hours of last year’s deer season in his stand, but never released an arrow because he wasn’t sure of a killing shot. Unfortunately some who hunt—and some who do not—have not learned to respect either the laws of the state or the higher laws of nature, to recognize their essential kinship with other animals with whom we share our Earth.

––Jerry

From the beginning, I was lured by woods. As a child on our 50-acre farm east of Oklahoma City, I followed the creek south from the house, crawled under a barbed wire fence and slipped into the woods my father rented for firewood and to graze his milk cows—80 acres of oaks, hickories, willows, cottonwoods, persimmons, meadow and swamp. To a boy of seven, an 80-acre forest is infinity. I knew the eighty’s orientation to the sun, where the land inclined, where the soil was boggy or dry, where groves of various trees grew, when and where to find ripe persimmons and why to avoid those that are not.

American persimmon tree

I knew the trails made by cows and men, but a boy of seven can follow trails of smaller animals too, and gradually I sketched ever-finer details on my mental map. I found the tracks of raccoons and possums and deer, sometimes following, sometimes intersecting the more predictable foot-wide paths of cows. On hands and knees, I followed the lower, narrower trails. Some tracks I didn’t know, but I followed them all, ever deeper into brambles and underbrush. I found where the possum crawled into his hollow hickory log. I knew the tall cottonwood in whose rotting trunk the raccoon lived. I found the limb on which he dined, saw where he dropped his waste, and learned what fruits and creatures he ate. Following trails expanded my universe of mammals and birds.

But nature herself is not a fan of trails. Decades before I read Rabelais’ observation that “nature abhors a vacuum,” I found it true. The height and width of each trail was no greater than that of the largest animal that regularly passed. A few large animals, moose for example, are equipped to keep trails wide, and deer help maintain trails by browsing brush. But of all the animals in the woods, only man carries nippers or saws to efficiently counter nature’s tendency to close trails. I am such a man.

There are rational reasons for trails. They provide access to otherwise forbidden places and to fallen firewood trees. They allow fuller access to the woods, whether by foot or on skis. And on the Missouri River bluff, where eastern red cedars are invading every square foot not otherwise occupied, trail blazing keeps remnants of native prairie alive and exposed to sun. So when fall rolls around, I take to the woods to make or maintain trails. That has been my occupation this fine November week. The result is a pair of new cross-country ski trails, the longest a quarter-mile run from bluff to river bottom.

But truthfully, all the logical reasons for trail maintenance are on some level rationalization for being in the woods. Perhaps my personal motive is not so different from that of the hunter who carries a gun instead of a saw, and whose object is deer rather than firewood or fun. Given the ingrained work ethic of our culture, we seem to need an excuse for frittering away an afternoon in the woods.

Trail maker that I am, I admit there is a problem with trails. Once constructed, whether by cows or coons or men, one may follow them without asking why. And perhaps that, in the end, is the attraction of cutting a new trail to find what lies in a tangle I have yet to explore. So do I face an inescapable conundrum—the paradox that in seeking adventure I tame the very wilderness I love? Probably not, recalling nature’s efficient way of countering our every move—and that we live amidst cedar trees, one of her most efficient tools.

––Jerry

Halloween, “hallowed eve,” is followed by the Day of the Dead. As we approach our longest nights, Americans and Mexicans face death, feigning fear and taunting symbols of death on Halloween, and communing with spirits of the dead. Having lost its spiritual aspect, Halloween is a night for costumes and masks, candy and outlandish acts. Across Mexico people gather in cemeteries November 2, washing gravestones, decorating tombs and offering food to loved ones lost.

On Halloween night a dozen friends sat around a bonfire with Norma and me beside the 1869 Severson log cabin. As the full moon cleared the eastern horizon, coyotes emerged from their dens and greeted the night. From then until midnight we were serenaded five times by choruses of coyotes, one pack hunting the corn fields and the narrow strip of brush and trees along Clay Creek to our south, another in our prairie and hills. The coyotes’ call is a blood-curdling cacophony of yips, wails and howls, the perfect accompaniment to the dark aura of Halloween. The exuberant yips and wails mean the pack is closing in on an unlucky cottontail or other prey, the most dramatic voice on our bluff.

I readily distinguish a lone coyote’s yip, and the practiced ear can separate the calls of a pair. But when more than two voices merge I hear discord that after years of straining, I cannot discern. Is it three, or half a dozen wailing at the moon? But on this night, one voice led the pack with sustained, hair-raising howls, while others added barks and yips. Whatever the makeup of the chorus or the reason for the cry, it brings joy to my heart; the presence of large predators is evidence of ecological health, of an ecosystem and a food chain achieving balance.

Following Halloween, the Day of the Dead dawned calm and clear. Trimming trees, I heard the distant chortle of sandhills cranes. I dropped my nippers and craned my neck toward the sky. Migrating sandhills fly at nearly stratospheric heights, so on windy days and in noisy places they pass overhead unheard. But this calm afternoon their trumpeting was distinct, and eventually I spotted them a mile up, a flock of four dozen lazily gliding south. I say lazily, because unlike geese, whose wings beat frantically and whose voices croak in seeming despair, cranes sail calmly in circles, riding thermal updrafts but with each revolution moving toward their southern winter home. The downside of their circuitous soaring is that a thousand-mile flight might require twice that many miles.

So what do the cranes have in common with the coyotes and me, we earth-bound neighbors for whom our cherished bluff is flyover country? Perhaps it is that Halloween and the Day of the Dead are mere figments of human imagination, rituals of death that have little to do with life. I raise a cheerful glass to Halloween and the Day of the Dead, and to coyotes, cranes and human friends, for this is the day and this is the world of life.

–Jerry

Don’t forget that if you would like to read more from Jerry, check out his book, Waiting for Coyote’s Call: An Eco-memoir from the Missouri River Bluff published by the South Dakota State Historical Society Press.

This is the first fall for full growth of native prairie on the home forty. For years we have restored or rehabilitated a few acres of native grasses and forbs each spring and summer, but the zone surrounding our house had remained primarily domesticated—bluegrass, brome and other non-native species. This summer we set our sights on bringing native culture closer to home. Now within a stone’s throw of the house on every side, six-foot native grasses grow. That, of course, has brought wildlife closer to our doors.

Over our 27 years on the bluff, the populations of many wild creatures, from possums and raccoons to squirrels and whitetail deer have expanded. Gradually our fellow inhabitants’ fear of humans has been replaced by curiosity, and we have become close neighbors. Deer, for example, have long lurked by the garden gate and peered inside at forbidden fruits. They have frequented the salt block under the mulberry tree, and on frigid days when I toss a can of corn on the snow, they miraculously materialize to dine. But in recent years, a small herd lives within a couple hundred yards of the house fulltime. Here they find cover and safety, water in the pond and spring, and plenty of their favorite foods—not just corn, but fruits, grasses and brush to browse.

So we know when rutting season comes. Among the telltale signs is bark freshly scuffed from young pine or ash trees, which tells us that testosterone is flowing and young bucks are testing their antlers. One finds their jousting grounds in the woods, a pair of meter-wide spots a dozen feet apart, pawed bare of grass. When a doe or a herd of does streaks across the valley before hunting season, we can expect a buck close behind. But second only to actual mating, the most dramatic manifestation of rutting season is the meeting of bucks, the locking of horns.

On a crisp sunrise last week, I had just settled into my recliner with coffee when a young buck strolled from behind a cedar tree. At this time of year they seem to fairly strut, heads and antlers held high, nostrils flared. As I watched, a second buck appeared, older and larger, and before long the two faced off. As if to complete the cast of the unfolding melodrama, three does arose from their beds in Indiangrass, a mother and last spring’s fawns.

The presence of females brought the bucks to action. The older and larger, a 10-pointer with an off-balance rack, moved in on the younger foe, a fellow with a mere eight points to his credit. The pair angled for position, pawed the earth a time or two and locked antlers. The younger fellow was more aggression than thrust, the equivalent perhaps of a human teen with raging hormones. For the veteran, it seemed more ritual than reality. Likely the two had met before, and the young buck was merely keeping up appearances—and announcing his candidacy for a future year.

Meanwhile, the doe and her teenaged daughters strolled demurely to the salt block and began to lick, apparently ignoring the valiant battle waged on their behalf.

–Jerry

To read Jerry’s memoir of the last 25 years or so, check out Waiting for Coyote’s Call: An Eco-memoir from the Missouri River Bluff.

The season of death has come. We’ve been flirting with frost for most of October, though the unusually wet and cloudy month has kept the killing freeze at bay. But Saturday morning the bluff was glazed with ice. Not the kind that falls from above, but the sort that creeps up from the earth as accumulated warmth and moisture from the passing season meets freezing air from the north. The result is astoundingly beautiful—millions of miniature crystals coating every exposed surface from blades of grass to rooftops and still-clinging leaves.

But the effect of frost is deadly. Except for bluegrass and brome and other cool season grasses that are able to withstand temperatures below 32 degrees, the grasses are dormant or dead. The garden is finished, and the only homegrown things we’ll eat for months are those stowed in jars and freezer bags and the cellar. A few petunias and a rose protected by our south overhand still bravely bloom, but all other flowers are finished. Sweet aromas have given way to wilt and decay. For the next six months, hopes and illusions of revival are gone.

Yet today the sun has returned, and its reach through south-facing windows is strong and long; this afternoon we’ll be toasting in t-shirts and socks without fossil fuels or wood. And there are other trade-offs and benefits to enjoy. Yes, I’ll be cutting and splitting firewood, but no more weeds to chop. I may soon be shoveling snow, but I won’t mow the lawn until May. The house may need touch-up stain, but well, I can’t do that until spring. There’s less daylight to enjoy, but more time to sit by the fire with friends, and maybe I’ll even get more sleep. Songbirds that depend on insects and nectar have flown south, but they are replaced at the feeder by a United Nations of winter birds.

And there are less tangible things. Winter is a time for reflection, a time to give thanks for the fruits of the season past. We may long for fresh cherries and apples, but we can heat up the oven and bake a pie from frozen fruit. The colder the night, the clearer the sky and its million stars, and the more distinct the yips of coyotes on the hunt. I prowl the woods more silently on fallen leaves, and through the opened canopy I gaze on distant hills.

Now the pendulum pace picks up, swinging ever faster toward the longest night. And with winter solstice less than two months away, we will hold our breaths until the faithful Earth resumes her tilt back toward the sun.

Hope does spring eternal in the human breast as poet Alexander Pope reminds us, and the coming winter gives us plenty of time and reasons to cultivate our capacities for hope. The opposite of hope is despair, and yes, sometimes through the long winter ahead we will be drawn by its grip. But let us keep our eyes on the crystalline frost below our feet and the constellations overhead. Despair is a state of mind, as is hope, as is the capacity to enjoy the beauty and promises that each moment brings.

–Jerry

Read more from Jerry in his book, Waiting for Coyote’s Call: An Eco-memoir from the Missouri River Bluff.

Laying stones is solitary work. Whether you’re building a wall or a walk, it’s one stone at a time. Eye the pile, choose one rock for possible fit, try every angle, then more than likely put it back and choose another. Sight and touch are fully engage, but rocks have no odor, and nothing is more silent than stone. That was my task on a recent afternoon, in this case building a pathway of basalt to the upper room, the space above the dug-into-the-hill garage accessible only from up the hill. On hands and knees, I concentrated myopically on the task at hand, oblivious to all overhead–until the air was pierced by the scream of a red-tailed hawk.

Any birdcall is a signal to stop whatever I’m doing and take a break and a look, even if it’s a robin or a dove. But of all our birds, the red-tail’s cry is perhaps most dramatic, splitting the air like a steam locomotive’s shriek. True, blue jays are capable of a fair imitation; they’ve fooled me more than once. But this cry came from high in the firmament. I had no doubt what I’d heard. It didn’t take long to spot the hawk circling directly overhead.

I put my tools aside and sprawled on my back in the grass for a better point of view, a perspective that would not strain my neck. Now I saw that there were actually two hawks, a pair gliding together on the updraft above the bluff. Round and round they went, drifting up the bluff on the wind. Focused intently as I was on the pair, I didn’t see the eagle until he entered the red-tails’ arc.

The bald eagle was engaged in the same activity as the smaller birds of prey, riding the updraft, searching for dinner. But then I realized that the eagle had something else in mind. Each revolution brought him closer to the hawks. His circle was wider, but his flight was faster, and he was closing in. Presumably the eagle saw the smaller raptors as competition for whatever rodents or rabbits might be exposed, and he was the biggest bird on the block.

But with greater size and speed comes diminished agility. The four-foot wingspan of the red-tails enabled them to easily evade the advancing eagle, which though not fully mature, had a wingspan a third wider than that of the hawks. The buteos didn’t seem especially concerned about the larger bird, but neither were they eager for a confrontation with the ruler of our skies. Gradually the eagle pushed them with the wind, and up the bluff they drifted, leaving behind any unlucky mammals the eagle-eyed monarch of the bluff might spy.

–Jerry

To read more from Jerry Wilson, check out Waiting for Coyote’s Call: An Eco-memoir from the Missouri River Bluff.

It’s October 12, Native American Day in South Dakota, and snow is already falling. Am I ready for this? I’ve removed the tomato cages and uprooted the garden plants so decomposition can begin. I’ve drained the garden hoses and put them away. I’ve cleaned the chimney and cut a little firewood, though I’ll surely need more.

Enchanting as it is, snow induces uneasiness about what lies ahead—and about how much we all have yet to do. But am I ready for winter? The real answer is yes. I don’t exactly look forward to cold and snow and the season of death, but I intend to enjoy it with bundled-up hikes and cross-country skiing across the prairies and through the woods. And those fall details left undone—I’ll get to them next week. I will face the coming season with confidence, because I’ve finally followed my father’s advice.

Years ago he told me I should convert the electrical system of my 50-year-old Ford tractor from six volts to twelve. I was always too busy to get it done, but the real reason is that compared to my father and brothers, I’m mechanically challenged. I wasn’t sure I was up to the task. So for decades I’ve limped along, hoping the old beast would start when I woke up to a blizzard and the crankcase and its contacts were below zero and the 500-foot driveway had to be cleared. Usually it did start, groaning and straining and coughing, but finally catching fire. But sometimes it didn’t, and that meant driving the pickup down the hill to the barn, jump-starting the tractor, and hoping I could get the pickup back up the hill. It was time for more certainty in life.

So I went to the local farm store for a 12-volt battery, found a Delco-Remy alternator from a 1982 Chevy pickup, picked up strap iron from the local welding shop and set about reconstructing the mounting brackets and eventually getting the new charging apparatus in place. Then came the hard part—wiring the new system so it would function. I called both of my brothers, and even a technician at Delco-Remy, and eventually I got the wiring figured out. Imagine my delight and surprise when it worked!

Now the old Ford fires up so fast that the mice that build nests above the radiator have little warning to leap for life. The ignition is hotter too, so the engine runs better than it has for years. So let it snow! I’m ready. Maybe not mentally, and certainly I share the trepidation of my neighbors, but I am more confident than ever that I’m prepared for the most dreaded task of winter, moving snow. Now I’d better tune up the chainsaw, because we’ll need lots more wood. As always, the black stripe on the wooly caterpillars is fuzzy and wide.

–Jerry

Read more from Jerry in his book, Waiting for Coyote’s Call

Anytime is a good time for a prairie hike. What could be better than strolling amongst purple cone flowers and black-eyed Susans and Mexican redhats and all the other flowers of a luxuriant native meadow?

Mexican redhats

But if spring on the prairie is wondrous and perfumed, late summer is magnificent and awe-inspiring. On a recent Sunday the Living River Sierra Club invited the public to hike our hills. Thirty people from many walks of life, from a toddler to a retired biologist, wandered and wondered the trails together. We explored the mysteries and identified the myriad grasses and forbs that thrive on restored and rehabilitated stretches of the Missouri River bluff.

As much as I enjoy sharing this realm with others, I at least equally enjoy going alone. This afternoon I sprawl in a world ruled by beetles, ants, mice and voles, the bottom of a food chain that includes the red-tailed hawk and the turkey vulture that sail the updrafts in search of food. I lie in a tangle of mixed prairie grasses in their glory, big bluestem, Indian grass and switch grass towering six feet high and waltzing in the wind, and contemplate the cosmos. The pitches and tones of the moaning wind are an orchestrated harmony played on grass heads and stems above, but not a breath of breeze touches my face on the floor of this forest of grass. I understand why the Zapotecs, the Maya, and other indigenous peoples of central and southern Mexico saw grasses and other plants as the spiritual link between Heaven and Earth. I inhale purity and absolution, exhale body moisture and heat, my breath rising toward the heavens, expiring in the cosmos. Whatever my transgressions, I find at-one-ment in the universe.

Below my elbows and thighs, the prairie roots reach down, both system and symbol. Each June, restored prairie and remnants of unbroken sod reawaken along our bluff, even here and there in pastures of brome where native grasses and forbs somehow survived decades of plowing, overgrazing and chemical warfare. Roots of the same big blue stem and pale purple cone flower that fed buffalo and elk for centuries resume their above-ground life.

The miracle of survival is simple, really; the roots are unfathomably deep. By weight, more than two-thirds of many prairie grasses is subterranean; the roots of big bluestem may reach 12 feet down. In the 1930s, University of Nebraska ecologist Weaver Clements excavated a small patch of prairie grass, and from a half-square-yard of earth, extracted 150 miles of root! And modern man thinks his fiber optic filaments complex.

But it would be a rare half-yard of earth that would contain the roots of a single plant. More likely, any place one sprawled in healthy native prairie, he would be within arm’s reach of at least half a dozen grasses and forbs. That, of course, is by design. “The old prairie lived by the diversity of its plants and animals, all of which were useful because the sum total of their cooperations and competitions achieved continuity,” said Aldo Leopold in A Sand County Almanac. In the modern world of monoculture, nothing fills me with wholeness and wonder like the rich diversity of native prairie.

–Jerry

Read more from Jerry in his book, Waiting for Coyote’s Call

Buffalo bur

Cocklebur

Sand bur

The tallgrass prairie is in its glory. The meadows we burned in April are heavy with seed, heads dancing in the breeze above my eyes where amber and rust meet the horizon. Though our prairie culture is far less diverse than that once grazed by buffalo, of the sixteen species we planted in 2005, each has found a place in a rewoven tapestry of native grasses and forbs. Yet, while investing hundreds of hours encouraging biodiversity, I and my hoe have simultaneously declared war on an axis of evil burs—sandbur, buffalo bur and cocklebur.

Nobody knows how many grasses and forbs grew along the Missouri River bluff when white settlers arrived about 1860, but in her book Prairie: A Natural History, Candace Savage estimates that at least 140 species of grasses and thousands of forbs took root and evolved on the post-glacial Great Plains. Our hillside remnants of unplowed prairie still support many of these plants, though diversity has greatly declined. Cattle overgrazed the hills, eliminating some species that depend upon seeding for perpetuation and allowing plants of more abundant foliage––including exotic imported grasses and weeds––to crowd them out. Trees encroached on the slopes, squeezing out plants that require full sun.

Alongside our efforts to restore native prairie, we also work to rehabilitate these unplowed scraps, where we have identified more than three dozen native survivors, including big and little bluestem, sideoats grama, Indian grass, switchgrass, needle-and-thread, Canada wild rye, witchgrass, tall dropseed, leadplant, purple coneflower, gayfeather, showy partridge pea, purple and white prairie clovers, yarrow, cornflower, showy and plains milkweeds, cudweed sagewort, heath aster, wavyleaf thistle, sunflower, skeleton plant, goldenrod, hoary puccoon, bracted spiderwort, snow-on-the-mountain, woodland sedge, shell leaf penstemon, wild onion, meadow anemone, buffalo bur, wooly verbena, prairie violet, groundplum milkvetch, smooth scouring rush and bittersweet.

Every plant in the rich native tapestry fills some niche; each of these—as well as many imported and invasive species—is used by humans or other mammals, insects or birds. And each has specialized mechanisms for dispersal; some spread by roots, while the seeds of others are transported to new locations by mammals or birds. But few exotic intruders are as well-suited for survival as the triumvirate of native insurgents that top my enemies list, my axis of evil burs––buffalo, cockle and sand. Perhaps these are the “thorns and thistles” with which, according to Genesis, God punished Adam and Eve for eating the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge. “Cursed is the ground,” God reportedly told Adam and Eve when he exiled them from the Garden of Eden. “Thorns and thistles shall it bring forth to thee.”

I have found no uses for these pests, besides clinging to the fur of animals and the pant legs of people, and in the case of the cocklebur, poisoning animals that eat its immature seeds. Yet I have no doubt that the handful of natives I don’t encourage fit somewhere in the natural scheme; otherwise, they would not have survived. Fortunately they are opportunistic invaders, and cease to thrive once native grasses are well-established. In the meantime, I spend late summer hours collecting their fruits to limit their spread. Proponent of natural diversity that I am, these prickly burs test the limits of my creed.

—Jerry

Read more from Jerry in his book Waiting for Coyote’s Call: An Eco-memoir from the Missouri River Bluff

See David Ode’s Dakota Flora: A Seasonal Sampler for more on burs and other plant life in the Dakotas.

A monarch butterfly

Only a few stragglers remain, prolonging this bittersweet late-summer season when weather is perfect, the prairie is in its glory, trees are heavy with apples and leaves are turning gold. Last week clusters of Monarchs clung overnight to cascading willow leaves by the pond, resting for the next day’s flight. A dozen or two might cluster together for warmth on a single twig. Now most have sailed south, still 2,000 miles from their winter sanctuary in the piney mountains west of Mexico City.

A cold-blooded creature, the Monarch’s body temperature dips with the thermometer. To fly, they must warm themselves to about 80 degrees Fahrenheit. At dawn they turn their black and yellow wings toward the sun, solar collectors that transfer heat to their thoraxes and abdomens for flight. If we move quietly, especially once the evening chill falls, we can approach very close to the clumps of gold. But don’t fool yourself that you’re fooling the Monarchs; the eyes that watch your approach are much more complex than ours. Thousands of lenses peer in all directions at once.

If long life is good, these Monarchs are the lucky ones. Of the four annual generations that each pass through four stages of life from egg to larva to chrysalis to adult, this generation, the great-grandchildren of those that left their Mexican mountains in early spring, will live longest. Their nectar-fueled flight will end in and around the Monarch colony at El Rosario in November. In February they will emerge from hibernation, mate and reproduce, and the four-generation cycle will begin again.

Last week a group of naturalists gathered on nearby Spirit Mound to capture and tag butterflies, part of the on-going effort to understand the Monarch miracle. Some other species of Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths) travel long distances, but usually in one direction, seeking food, and no other travels so far. How could these almost weightless creatures fly from the northern Great Plains or even the northeastern states, across Mexican desert and high Sierra, to find their winter home in the exact spot their great-grandparents left months ago, sometimes the same tree?

The casualty rate is high. Thousands are smashed on the windshields of cars and trucks, and some fall victim to poisons and other machinations of man. Birds know better than to eat Monarchs, whose milkweed diet contains a nauseating substance similar to digitalis that makes birds sick. Before I learned that milkweed is the milk and honey of Monarch larvae, I sometimes chopped them down; now I welcome their fleecy seedpods. But in a world of monoculture, some migrating Monarchs simply can’t find bed and breakfast––food and a place to rest––in a world that little values biodiversity and habitat for fellow creatures like butterflies.

All too soon leaves will turn the color of Monarchs, but they will migrate only to the earth. The long season of barren branches and twigs will come, reason enough to cache memories of Monarchs while they are here, images to recall on long winter nights cheered only by the fluttering flame of blazing wood.

–Jerry

To read more about Jerry’s observations of monarch butterflies and other members of the animal kingdom, check out Waiting for Coyote’s Call: An Eco-memoir from the Missouri River Bluff