What’s a butterfly doing in a bird blog? Well, butterflies can fly, and many of them come in colors - beautiful colors. Some of them migrate like birds, in fact further than many birds. And, well, with all due respect, I get to decide.
Recently I was watching the monarchs flutter about our butterfly bush in amazing abundance. And, for some reason I was reminded of “The Butterfly Effect.” It’s not a real effect, but a metaphor for how simple seemingly random events can have completely unexpected downstream effects and undermine our ability to predict the outcomes of complex systems like the weather - the fluttering of a butterfly’s wing in the Amazon River basin causes a tornado in Texas. Then a few days ago the New York Times crossword puzzle’s theme was “chaos theory” - the mathematical thinking behind The Butterfly Effect. And today, the (excellent) French detective novel that my son gave me for my birthday, The Ghost Riders of Ordebec, by Fred Vargas, invoked The Butterfly Effect. I’m thinking there must be a lot of Amazonian butterflies flapping awfully hard for me to run into the Butterfly Effect in three separate ways inside of a week. I thought, I’d better blog about butterflies!
Monarch butterfly caterpillar munching a milkweed leaf
One way or another children are starting back to school this week. Even with remote learning (all of my learning seems a little more remote every day, but that’s another story), I am willing to bet that there are at least a dozen (probably more) elementary school teachers who have just this week told their students to go out and find a milkweed patch or given directions to one. In that patch, the students (and probably a parent) will need to find the caterpillar of the monarch butterfly and bring it home with some of the milkweed leaves, since these caterpillars can only survive on milkweed. The students are then to install the caterpillar and milkweed in a terrarium (or large mason jar) and watch what happens. Depending on the stage of the caterpillar’s development, it may shed a layer of skin once or twice, and then it will hang itself up and build a chrysalis shell in which it will become a pupa as it miraculously transforms itself into a stunning monarch butterfly.
What’s even more miraculous is that this small and seemingly delicate butterfly will soon join millions of eastern monarch brethren on a round-trip migration to the Sierra Madre Mountains of Mexico and a few other destinations. Having never been there, they nevertheless “know” exactly where to go and where to stop along the way to cuddle up with thousands of other monarchs to keep warm and reduce energy loss. But you lucky parents and children who have been out wandering in the milkweed already know this story.
Circling back to the monarchs on our butterfly bush and with The Butterfly Effect in mind, I think, as usual, Mary Oliver captures it best:
For years and years I struggled just to love my life. And then
the butterfly
rose, weightless, in the wind.
"Don't love your life
too much," it said,
and vanished
into the world.