Planting havens for monarchs and bees

By Joel Wittnebel/The Oshawa Express

The monarch butterflies that call Oshawa home may be gone for the winter, but when they return in the spring, they could have a few more accommodations to choose from.

Following final approval of a recently released report from council, city staff will be working with the Oshawa Environmental Advisory Committee (OEAC) to finalize locations for milkweed plants on city land.

The plant, labelled a noxious weed for years by the province, was continuously ripped out from roadsides and fields. However, the problem was that pollinators like bees, wasps, beetles and hummingbirds were relying on the plant for its nectar.

Trumping that, monarch butterflies rely on the milkweed plant as the sole location to lay their eggs.

“Without milkweed, monarch butterflies would be deprived of a plant essential to their survival,” the city’s report reads.

It wasn’t long after the milkweed started to disappear that monarch populations plummeted, decreasing by as much as 90 per cent in the last 20 years.

In 2014, recognizing the plant’s importance, milkweed was removed from the noxious weeds list by the province, cueing a slew of stewardship programs to pop up across the country.

In Oshawa, the city is looking at several locations in which to plant more milkweed, including city parks like Lakefront West, Harmony Valley, Farwell and Limerick Park, while also looking at locations around the Legends Centre and Pumphouse Marsh.

“There are other locations, especially throughout naturalized areas that would work extremely well,” says Glenn Simmonds, the city’s director of operations.

For Patricia Lowe, the director of community engagement for the Central Lake Ontario Conservation Authority (CLOCA), the program is a great first step for assisting monarch populations.  However, there are several more steps that could be taken.

“In Ontario, we really don’t have a shortage of milkweed – it’s just the journey for the butterflies to get back here which is challenging,” Lowe explains.

Monarch butterlies spend their winters in Mexico before returning home for the warmer months. Due to farming practices in the United States, which has eliminated natural buffers where milkweed flourishes, it can be hard for many of them to survive the journey.

“As they’re moving back to Ontario, three or four generations, they’re not finding the milkweed,” Lowe says. “We’re doing this in the north and we need to convince our neighbours to the south (to do the same).”

Lowe suggests the city look at challenging American municipalities to step up and implement similar programs to theirs, or at the very least make the issue more well known.

“Oshawa, as a municipality, could be putting some pressure on cities in the states to do the same,” she says. “We have to think about the big picture.”

This is also not the first time Oshawa has taken steps to help their local pollinators. In 2004, the city worked with the Durham Field Naturalists to build a butterfly garden on Rossland Road, west of Simcoe Street and the Oshawa Creek.

The city has also been recently awarded funding through the CN EcoConnexions program to incorporate a pollinator meadow at the Legends Centre. The project is pending budget approval for 2017.