Pollinators could benefit from the pandemic

My recent piece for Big Sky Journal describes how landscaping with native plants can help our declining insect pollinators.

I started my research by talking with my friend Diane Jones, owner of Draggin' Wing High Desert Nursery in Boise, ID. Jones remembered that 2020 at first looked like a tough year in the plant business. Organizations cancelled their spring sales, where Jones usually sells plants early in the season. 

But, as people spent more time at home, they noticed their yards could use some attention. As they saved time and money on commuting and socializing, people started on yard projects. They went to  Draggin’ Wing for plants, ideas, and advice. “People kept coming and coming,” Jones remembered. 

Looking back over her almost 20 years in business, Jones has seen a steady increase in the use of native plants in landscaping. Concern over the precipitous drop in our pollinators is driving much of the interest in natives, Jones said. Much of the pandemic yard work involved creating pollinator-friendly yards.

Monarch butterflies (Danaus plexippus) are, sadly, our best-known pollinator in peril. Monarchs rely solely on milkweeds for raising their young. As the plants’ roadside and wildland habitats are converted to other uses, and adjacent crops are sprayed with herbicides, milkweeds—and monarchs—are disappearing.

Native milkweeds:  Asclepias tuberosa, A. speciosa, A. fascicularis (© Draggin' Wing High Desert Nursery)

We have fewer monarch butterflies west of the Rockies and they seem to be declining faster than those in the east. While eastern monarchs overwinter in Mexico, their western siblings head to groves on the southern California coast. Where over a million orange-and-black butterflies covered the trees as recently as 1997, fewer than 30,000 were found three years ago. This past winter, western monarchs numbered fewer than 2,000. Researchers feared the worst. 

However, while we were adapting to working from our living rooms and remembering to unmute on Zoom, monarch butterflies were adapting to living in San Francisco and laying eggs. At least some of the missing monarchs appear to have stopped in the Bay Area to create a pandemic baby boom instead of continuing on to their winter homes. (The predicted human baby boom turned out to be a baby bust.)

David James, at Washington State University, has tagged and tracked western monarch butterflies since 2012. In a recent academic paper, James says that the new stay-home-and-reproduce behavior is likely due to warmer temperatures in northern California and the availability of non-native African milkweeds, which are widely planted in the area. 

This isn’t the first time James has seen monarchs change their migration and breeding habits. Four decades ago, he saw a similar shift among monarchs in Australia, where the insects were introduced. James is hopeful that western monarchs will adapt and thrive, but cautions that we don’t yet understand all the challenges they will face. 

If you didn't finish your pandemic yard work, you can still help pollinators by planting native milkweeds for our iconic monarch butterflies—and the more than 100 other insects that use them. Draggin’ Wing High Desert Nursery carries the three kinds of milkweed pictured here.

You can help agaves and bats in southern Arizona

Step outdoors on a warm southern Arizona night and you might be swept up in what naturalist Ralph Waldt calls a "bat tornado" of winged mammals. Residents routinely wake to find that the clouds of bats have drained their hummingbird feeders overnight.

Although nectar-feeding bats are most noticeable in the area, only two of the 30 bats native to Arizona feed from flowers; most Arizona bats eat insects. Both nectar-feeders, Choeronycteris mexicana (Mexican long-tongued bat) and Leptonycteris yerbabuenae (lesser long-nosed bat), visit Cascabel during warm months.

World-wide, the more than 1,300 bat species represent almost a fourth of the over 5,400 mammals. Bats have the agility to catch and eat prodigious amounts of night-flying insects and to pollinate night-blooming flowers atop tall agave stalks and columnar cacti.

Agaves and cacti provide bats a nectar meal in exchange for pollen the bats inadvertently carry among plants. The bats move with the blooms, from southern Mexico in winter to the grasslands of northern Mexico and the southern U.S. in summer.

This elegant partnership evolved over millions of years and is crucial to the survival of both partners. Currently, bats and agaves are both threatened by climate change and the loss of agaves to land clearing, development, and the harvest of wild agave for bacanora, the agave liquor of Sonora.

The lesser long-nosed bat is the more imperiled of the two nectar feeders in this area. Although this bat was removed from the endangered species list by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 2018, these pollinators are still at risk due to the decline of their nectar sources.

The Borderlands Restoration Network (BRN), in Patagonia, Arizona, works with many partners to protect bats by increasing their agave food supply. You can help both agaves and bats by participating in two of these projects.

BRN and volunteers track the effects of climate change on two native agaves in our area through the USA National Phenology Network's Flowers for Bats campaign. Many plants are blooming earlier as our climate warms. If bats migrate from Mexico on their usual schedule, but Agave parryi and Agave palmeri bloom earlier, the bats might arrive to find nothing to eat.

BRN replants agaves lost from the southwest U.S. and northwestern Mexico as part of Bat Conservation International's Agaves for Bats campaign. Each year, BRN collects agave pups and seed to grow thousands of agaves for planting by landowners.

If you haven't experienced a bat tornado, keep your hummingbird feeders full for the night shift, watch when agaves flower in your area, and plant some agaves at your place. Then step outdoors on a warm southern Arizona night and wait for the whirlwind.

The vineyard is a-LIVE

Vineyards are evocative, pastoral landscapes that invite visitors to linger and relax with a glass of wine. These agricultural fields can be more or less environmentally friendly, depending on how they are managed. Bitner Vineyards is the first and, so far, only Low Input Viticulture and Enology (LIVE) certified vineyard in Idaho.

Ron and Mary Bitner use science-based practices to protect water, soil, and pollinators. The couple provide habitat for pollinators and use cover crops, integrated pest management (IPM) techniques, and biological control methods to reduce their use of pesticides. Embracing science comes naturally for Ron Bitner--his first career took him around the world as an expert on leafcutter bees for pollinating alfalfa.

I wrote about the Bitner’s LIVE vineyard in the Spring issue of Edible Idaho.

A Gift of Stayman's Winesaps

I got out my Imperial Veri-Sharp paring knife with the stainless steel blade. My grandmother would have approved. To her mind, stainless was next to godliness: it lasted forever and was easy to keep clean. As a Trustee of her local hospital in the 1950s, she insisted that all the new sinks be stainless steel.

I selected one of the Stayman's Winesaps. They were my grandmother’s favorite apple; she said that a “Delicious apple” was an oxymoron. When I learned Otis and Barbara had one of the trees in their Boise backyard, I banished politeness and asked for some of the fruit.

I rinsed off the faint wash of white clay that dulled the apple’s skin. Otis meant to spray the fruit with kaolin clay every two weeks. But he often let a bit more time pass before he got out his hand pump sprayer and applied another coat. Insects hoping for a meal of apples, or to lay eggs in their flesh, don’t like walking or crawling through the clay particles. They leave clay-covered fruits alone.

I cut around the apple’s meridian from the top to the blossom end and back up the other side. Then I trimmed away the stem and the remains of the dried blossom from each half and carefully cut around the core, or pome, which gives apples, pears, and quince their name (“pome fruit”). When she cored an apple, my grandmother left a smooth, shallow dimple. I tend to gouge out uneven divots that take some of the flesh, too: I waste good food. I can still hear my grandmother chide me whenever I reach for a vegetable peeler instead of a knife: “Peelers waste so much.”

She served chicken on one of my visits. I thought I did a fine job of cleaning my plate: I left a pile of bones connected by ligaments, tendons, and a few shreds of meat in the hard-to-reach places. My grandmother reduced her chicken to a pile of clean, dry, disarticulated bones that would have inspired a colony of dermestid beetles to work longer hours.

Otis had ensured that their tree produced good-sized Stayman’s Winesap apples, so I cut each half into slices. Standing on his tripod orchard ladder, he had thinned the fruit when the developing apples were about the size of one of his fingernails. He removed all but one from each cluster of flowers; if there were still too many fruits along a branch, he removed entire clusters.

Biting into the first slice, I tasted the pink and white perfume of last spring’s apple blossoms. Bee legs tickled the inside of my cheek and a pollen basket might have brushed my tongue. That bee, or another one, must have spilled a few grains of pollen from one of its baskets onto the flower that produced the apple I was eating.

Most of the foods we eat, other than grains (corn, wheat, barley, etc.), must be pollinated by insects, and bees do most of the work. Whenever I see a truck loaded with hives of honeybees on their way to a pollinating job, I can’t resist waving. I wave and I worry about the bees’ dwindling numbers, as Colony Collapse Disorder ravages hives across the country. Researchers don’t completely understand the cause, or treatment, of the disorder: disease, stress, and pesticides are all suspects.

I ate the Stayman's Winesap slowly. All things in moderation; don’t be greedy; live within your means. My grandmother lived within her means. When my brothers and I were kids, she lived in the house her grandfather built in 1873. We assumed everyone’s grandmother had a commode chair with a chamber pot in the downstairs bedroom and a wood-burning range in the kitchen.

When she was 80, my grandmother built a new house, after realizing it would be cheaper than fixing up her old one. Her new house had hardwood floors, marble windowsills, thermal pane windows, a tiled fireplace hearth with a mantelpiece made from a maple tree that grew in her woods, and a small greenhouse off the garage. Her new house did not have a mortgage.

The wood-burning range went into the basement of her new house, “for when the power goes out.” The refrigerator wasn’t worn out yet, so she put it in the basement, too, and stored apples and other fruit in it. As I swallowed the last bite of my first Stayman’s Winesap, I remembered my grandmother's new kitchen. She bought a new fridge, an electric range, and her first dishwasher. The range and the dishwasher were clad in stainless steel.

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More about apples

The apples we see in the grocery store are only a tiny sample of the thousands of varieties that exist. Orchards planted by early European settlers in Idaho contain valuable genetic resources. Learn how this diversity is being cataloged and preserved here.

European honeybees, which travel from orchard to orchard in hives, aren't our only pollinators. Learn more about our 4,000 species of native bees here.