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Monarchs of the Urban Mind Betsy McCully On a cloudless September Sunday in 1984, thousands of monarch butterflies descended from the sky to nectar on seaside goldenrods, their collective weight bending the stalks down. One might expect migrating monarchs in a country field, but not in the rock rubble of a Manhattan Beach jetty. Rumors flew around my Coney Island neighborhood , and people rushed down to the impromptu monarch festival, myself among them. Monarchs clustered so densely they turned the goldenrods orange. They hovered above the flowers, each waiting its turn to unfurl its proboscis into the nectar sacs and sip. They floated above our heads and alighted in our hair and on outstretched hands as children joyfully reached out to them. For two days they remained, nectaring and resting before resuming their migration southward; then just as mysteriously as they had appeared they vanished, all but a few stragglers reminding us of what had been. It was my first year living in New York City, and I just assumed that the monarchs stopped here every year, like the swallows of Capistrano. But in the years since, they have never returned in such numbers. It was a rare event, not because monarchs are rare, but because it was a random and ephemeral occurrence. And it was unexpected because it happened in a densely populated, heavily polluted, and radically altered urban landscape. Coney Island was once a place of dunes, beach grasses, and bayberries, divided from Long Island by a tidal creek. It’s thought that Henry Hudson stopped here before piloting his Half Moon into New York Bay. The PAGE 13 13 ................. 18313$ $CH2 09-07-12 13:54:03 PS 14 Betsy McCully Dutch named the island after the rabbits that abounded here, the konijen, or coneys. Development of the island began in the 1820s, but not until after the Civil War was its oceanfront built up as a resort and pleasure ground. In the 1870s, real estate developer August Corbin bought up land on Coney Island’s eastern tip, a swath of salt marsh known as Sedge Bank, renaming it Manhattan Beach. He built two resort hotels—the Oriental and the Manhattan Beach—along the shorefront. To protect the resorts from the sea’s onslaught, men constructed rock jetties and sea walls. They made an esplanade so people could stroll from Manhattan Beach to Brighton Beach and take the sea air. They flattened the dunes to make beaches. The hotels have long given way to houses, and over the decades, hurricanes and nor’easters have broken up the jetty and esplanade. Goldenrods and other wild plants that can withstand salt spray have anchored their roots in pockets of soil. The monarchs have imprinted themselves in my memory not as isolated objects to net and mount for study, but as parts of a living whole. Monarchs gliding in the medium of air, warming their bodies in the sun, fueling on nectar for their flight. Goldenrods harnessing energy in the solar cells of their leaves, taking up minerals and water in their stiff stems, transforming light and water into flowers that thrust their stamens and pistils toward pollinators to ensure their reproduction. And people drawn by invisible strings toward the monarch gathering, becoming a part of the scene, entering the monarchs’ universe. How improbable the monarchs seem in this urban landscape! Yet they are merely repeating a migratory cycle begun thousands of years ago at the end of the last ice age, when a warming climate drew this tropical butterfly northward. Long before New Yorkers hardened the city’s shorelines and pumped sand onto smoothed and flattened beaches, monarchs nectared on goldenrods that grew in coastal dunes. They are one of a handful of butterfly species that migrate, and they travel the longest distance, two thousand miles between Canada and Mexico. For countless generations they have obeyed an inner GPS, migrating southward in fall and northward in spring. On their north-bound journey, they nectar on milkweed blossoms , mate, lay eggs on the underside of milkweed leaves, and die. Their larvae hatch, feed on the milkweed leaves, and pupate into butterflies that continue their journey northward. On their southward journey, the fourth generation returns to their wintering grounds in the Sierra Madre of Mexico, where they roost in stands of Oyamel trees. Lengthening days and warming temperatures in spring trigger their reproductive cycle, and a new generation sets out on their journey north. How each successive PAGE 14 ................. 18313$ $CH2...

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