Page 1 - Clinton Currents Volume XIX Issue 1 - Winter 2019

Volume XIX Issue 1
Winter 2019
Guide to the Charter Township of Clinton
“What's a butter y garden without butter ies?” – Roy Rogers
The Clinton Township Senior Adult Life Center is many things to many people. It’s also many things to certain insect species too, namely monarch butter ies. That’s because the Senior Center’s Garden of Life, which produced more than 1,300 pounds of organically grown food last year, has become certi ed and registered as a Monarch Waystation.
“Our waystation feeds the monarchs,” she said. “We have their food, their nectar source – the asclepias, or butter y weed, which they can lay their eggs on.”
The monarch migration is a great natural wonder. Each fall, millions of monarch butter ies migrate from the United States and Canada to areas in California and Mexico, where they wait out the winter until conditions favor a return ight in the spring. However, according to MonarchWatch.org, land development
A Monarch Waystation
is an intentionally-
managed garden that provides food and habitat for monarchs, in the form of nectar plants and milkweeds, throughout their annual cycle of reproduction and migration.
The waystation certi cation was awarded by MonarchWatch.org, a conservation group that researches, educates and takes ownership of monarch habitats and the protection of the struggling monarch butter y population.
MonarchWatch.org, also saw t to recognize Senior Center member Janet Kaltenbach, for her work in creating and maintaining a portion of the Garden of Life that has become a home to monarchs. Kaltenbach, an advanced master gardener and pollinator champion, is doing her part to assure the annual North American migration of the monarch continues.
Janet Kaltenbach, Advanced Master Gardener, shows the new Monarch Waystation certi cation sign for the Senior Center’s Garden of Life.
A Monarch Waystation provides food and habitat for monarch butter ies. Photo by J. Kaltenbach.
and the widespread use of herbicides is reducing the natural habitat for monarchs at an alarming rate. The building of homes, industrial centers and shopping plazas in the United States is consuming habitats for monarchs and other wildlife at a rate of 6,000 acres per day. That's 2.2 million acres each year, the area of Delaware
and Rhode Island combined.
“Spraying eliminates
the milkweed so the monarchs have nowhere
to go,” said Kaltenbach. “It’s a very big challenge and it’s worldwide, not just here, and it’s the same thing with our pollinator plants. There are less of them too.”
(Continued on page 10)
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