This hot summer is hard on more than your lawn, it's hurting monarch butterflies
Some local residents are stepping up on conservation efforts
It's been a hot, dry summer in Windsor-Essex, with more days over 30 C and more people going to hospital with heat illness.
Turns out, monarch butterflies are also feeling the impact on their food sources, a biologist says.
The lack of food will make fall migration for the endangered pollinators particularly difficult, said Heather Kharouba, an associate professor at the department of biology at the University of Ottawa.
A monarch butterfly pollinating in Leo Silvestri's yard. The monarch enthusiast transformed his city yard into a butterfly garden. (CBC News)
"That is sort of going to have this double whammy on them," she said.
Kharouba explains that monarch butterflies need to feed on plant nectar, while their caterpillars rely on milkweed leaves before forming a chrysalis.
For the flowers that haven't withered from the heat and dry weather, the quality of nectar seems to be changing, she says.
"So we are anticipating that that will have additional impacts on the monarch," said Kharouba.
Local monarch conservation efforts
Some people have taken monarch conservation measures into their own hands.
Leo Silvestri leads a local Facebook group dedicated to monarch conservation, where members share information about the pollinator habitats.
The retired house painter, who calls himself the "Milkweed Man", transformed his city yard into a butterfly garden.
A monarch butterfly sits on Leo Silvestri's hand in his Windsor garden in 2019. (CBC News)
"After COVID struck, that was our fortune. Fortune because a lot of people were locked down and they didn't know what to do. And now all of a sudden they kept joining and joining," said Silvestri.
He says he hasn't personally noticed a difference in the monarchs he raises just yet. But he and others will be releasing dozens of home-reared monarchs at the Windsor Butterfly Festival, co-hosted by Via Italia and the Monarch Butterfly Enthusiasts of Windsor-Essex, this weekend.
Kharouba said Silvestri's conservation efforts go a long way and that there's increasing evidence that urban gardens like his play a big role in pollinator protection.
"Those small areas are key. And so they are playing a sort of like higher importance or relatively more weight than you would have thought based on the smallness or the size of those gardens," said Kharouba.
This article was originally published for CBC News with files from Emma Loop