Tribal youth build butterfly houses; adults restore beauty, native plants to Sand Point on Lake Superior
L’Anse, Mich. - Millions of Monarchs will begin arriving in Mexico this week in an annual migration that includes thousands traveling through Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and some of the butterflies can thank Keweenaw Bay Indian Community teens for their future survival.
17-year-old Ethan Smith (left) and 15-year-old Janelle Paquin (right), both of Baraga, build a butterfly house at the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community (KBIC) fish hatchery near L’Anse. The KBIC teens with the tribe’s summer youth program participated in the new Zaagkii Wings & Seeds Project that was created to protect pollinators. (Photo by Greg Peterson)
The Zaagkii Wings and Seeds Project in Marquette was created to protect pollinators like butterflies because billions of honeybees are dying across the world – especially in the Midwest – in a syndrome called “Colony Collapse Disorder.”
Keweenaw Bay Indian Community (KBIC) youth and Marquette teens spent this summer building the first of dozens of butterfly houses that will be created over the next three years. The white cedar butterfly houses were put up this fall in two U.P. counties (Marquette and Baraga counties). Lined with bark and slimmer than birdhouses, the shelters offer protection, rest and reproduction safety to Monarchs and other butterflies.
Translated Mem’ en gwa in Algonquian, the butterfly has long been honored by Ojibwa lore, poems and children’s games. KBIC teens are helping to ensure the butterflies will forever pollinate fruits, vegetables and flowers.
“Send me butterflies, so that I will be free,” states one Chippewa poem while the Ojibwa game “Butterfly Hide and Seek” teaches children to “never to hurt a butterfly” because it’s a “gift of good luck if you stayed so quiet that a butterfly would trust you and land on you,” according to American Indian internet sites.
Zaagkii is an Ojibwa word that means: “The Earth’s gift of plants” and “The Earth giving birth to plants.”
While bees are the best known and possible the most effective pollinators, butterflies are a close second in transferring pollen from one plant to another.
Experts are unsure why honeybee colonies are collapsing but pesticides, climate change and other man-made impact are among the suspected causes. Experts say the loss of the honeybees is alarming because without pollinators the world food supply will dry up including fruits, vegetables, flowers, other plants and trees.
The Zaagkii Project was founded this summer by the non-profit Cedar Tree Institute (CTI) in Marquette whose other environment projects have included wild rice restoration and Earth Day hazardous waste collections.
Albert Einstein made a grim - but surely accurate - prediction on what will happen if bees vanish.
“Albert Einstein, who most people recognize as an intelligent person, speculated once that if bees disappeared off the surface of the earth, then humans would have only four years of life left,” said Todd Warner, KBIC Natural Resource Director.
“The problem with disappearing pollinators is a cause for concern (because) all life is interconnected,” Warner said.
“The health of a community is intertwined with the health of their environment, their water, their air, their soil and so on,” he said. “Problems with one area lead to problems in other areas”
“If the pollinators disappear, then vegetation systems are disrupted and begin collapsing, some plants will disappear, many or most fruits and vegetables disappear, and the ripple of impact moves outward in ways we can’t predict,” Warner said.
During a CTI event for project supporters, Northern Michigan University (NMU) student David Anthony made a Native American tobacco and food offering to “the Great Spirits.”
“Thank you for the Zaagkii Project,” said Anthony, a member of the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa (Ottawa) Indians in Harbor Springs, MI. “Thank you for the animals and all the birds, the trees, the plants.”
“Thank you for all the interconnectiveness that we have today - it’s through these interconnections that we find the healing,” said Anthony, who writes for the Anishinaabe News - the NMU Native American student-run newspaper.
Then cameras and recording devices were turned off as April Lindala sang Ojibwa songs taught to her as a gift from members of the tribe because she doesn’t speak their language.
A member of the Six Nations tribe, Lindala is the director of the NMU Center for Native American Studies.
“Since those (songs) were gifts, I would ask that nobody record anything because they are not mine and they are sacred,” Lindala asked the crowd who followed her wishes.
The three-year Zaagkii Project is sponsored by the KBIC, CTI, Marquette County Juvenile Court and the United States Forest Service (USFS).
As honeybees vanish, the USFS is also worried about the decline in bumblebees including two species that have gone extinct.
“We are seeing a reduction in the number of bumblebees,” said Jan Schultz, Botany and Non-native Invasive Species Program Leader at the USFS eastern region office in Milwaukee.
“Bumblebees are pollinators on steroids – they are tens times more effective in pollinating than a honeybee,” she said. “They engage in a particular type of pollenation that’s called buzz pollenation.”
“You’ll hear this drilling buzzing sound – it’s a loud buzzing sound,” Shultz said. “They violently buzz the inside of that plant.”
“There are some plants species that have to be pollinated that roughly to be effectively pollinated,” she said. “Bumblebees are fabulous pollinators.”
Another important part of the Zaagkii Project is restoring native plants to the once barren Sand Point, a Lake Superior beach where the environment has been degraded by the deposition of decade’s old copper mining waste.
Marquette teens planted over 26,000 native species in seed trays and many of those will be transplanted at Sand Point in the spring of 2009.
The KBIC Summer Youth Program teens built and painted butterfly houses at the tribal hatchery this summer with help from Natural Resource Department (NRD) Water Quality Specialist Kit Laux, NRD environment specialists Char Beesley and Katie Kruse and youth supervisors Cody Blue, Kim Klopstein and Nancy Voakes.
As birds chirped loudly along the shores of Lake Superior, 17-year-old Ethan Smith, 15-year-old Janelle Paquin and other KBIC teens measured, hammered and painted the butterfly houses.
“We put the bark on the inside like so – for the butterflies to rest on,” said Smith while showing the strips of bark that line the house. “We put on the top so the sunlight doesn’t get in and they can get a good night’s rest.”
14-year-old Jorey Cribbs of Baraga said plants reproduce because butterflies “transport pollen from flower to flower” and the butterfly houses offer “shelter in bad weather.”
William Ross-Geroux,14, of Baraga said he learned that when pollinators “land on flowers and then land on different flowers they help them reproduce.”
The butterfly houses sit on 10-foot poles. Butterflies with folded wings enter through seven tiny slits.
“Butterflies use the houses to rest while migrating,” said 16-year-old Dylan DeCota of Baraga.
“I learned that when butterflies land on flowers and they pick up pollen from other flowers this starts the pollination process,” said 14-year-old Briar Nieskes of Baraga.
Warner said it’s important for tribal teens to protect pollinators.
“Young people learning about pollinators and native plants today will carry this knowledge for the rest of their lives,” Warner said. “How they use it will be up to them.”
Each fall “hundreds of thousands” of Monarchs “stop and rest” on the Stonington Peninsula in the southern U.P. before joining three million Monarchs from across North America in their annual migration to Mexico, said Jon Magnuson, CTI executive director and founder of the Zaagkii Project.
“A lot of people think butterflies are just pretty but they do important work,” Magnuson told the KBIC teens as they built butterfly houses.
“Butterflies ride the winds” and warm thermals as they fly only a few inches off the ground or soar 2,000 feet in the air, Magnuson said.
“They don’t fly against the wind. If the wind is going against them, they just rest. They hide somewhere.”
“When the wind blows behind them they get on the winds and ride them,” Magnuson said turning around to gesture a tail wind and then using both hands to demonstrate gliding. “That’s how they get to Mexico.”
About 32 years ago, the group Monarch Watch first discovered the annual Monarch migration and began tracking the butterflies, said Zaagkii Project volunteer Tom Reed.
Monarchs “converge in one small area” in Mexico and “drape down off of these trees,” said Reed, who has a bachelors degree in social work. “They are really vulnerable to extinction.”
“Pollinators come in many forms – even the wind is a pollinator – it blows around pollen from one flower to another,” Reed said.
Marquette teens were given a tour of a Negaunee Township bee farm where the hives are home to about 60,000 honeybees.
Beekeeper Jim Hayward, a dentist who prefers honey to sugar, explained the different jobs of bees in a colony like the workers and how a hive produces a queen. Hayward said if all bees disappeared the world food supply would be devastated as “fruits, vegetables, nuts and other commercial crops” vanish.
“If they need to create a new queen, they feed worker larvae an extract from their heads called royal jelly,” said Hayward, who explained bees communicate the location of nectar to others in the hive by the “frequency they wag their abdomens” and using the sun.
“We are all dependent on bees and other things,” Hayward said after several teens thanked him for the tour that included tasting fresh honey, dressing in protective gear, touching drones that don’t have stingers and opening wooden crates that house thousands of honeybees who have been calmed with a smoker filled with slowly burning dried sumac.
Hayward taught the teens to use the dried sumac and honey to make a tea that tastes like lemonade.
“The more you learn about nature and can understand nature – the more you can appreciate the web of life and how we all exist,” said Hayward, adding that bald-faced hornets are one of the biggest killers of honeybees.
Marquette teens planted about 26,000 native plants seeds at the Hiawatha National Forest greenhouse in Marquette. Those plants will winter in the greenhouse and be transplanted next spring across northern Michigan.
“They are planting seeds that are native to the U.P.,” said Angie Lucas, Hiawatha National Forest contractor and greenhouse manager. “Native plants play a vital role in insect populations.”
“For example Monarch caterpillars are specific to milkweed plants and without milkweed plants we have no Monarch caterpillars,” Lucas said, adding that at least 17 Monarchs tagged on the U.P.’s Stonington Peninsula were discovered in Mexico.
Milkweed seeds are collected at the Hiawatha National Forest, raised in the Marquette greenhouse and the young plants are returned to nature, Lucas said.
“The milkweed provides food for the Monarch caterpillars – once the caterpillars mature and turn into a butterfly that pollinates the milkweed plant,” said Lucas describing the symbiotic relationship between butterflies and native plants.
The Marquette teens “went to libraries and studied about the Monarch butterflies and their life cycle and their migration patterns,” said Danny Weymouth, 16, whil talking to a group of Zaagkii Project supporters.
“We ended up learning about bees and we went and looked at some honey bees and learned about their life cycles,” Weymouth said. “Protecting the pollinators is what the project is really about.”
While planting seeds, several Marquette teens explained why the Zaagkii Project was important to pollinators.
Restoring indigenous plants is vital to U.P. wildlife “so our native species don’t get overruled and extinct by predator species,” said Justin Fassbender, 16, while planting columbine and monarda seeds.”
Ensuring the future of native plants is important because “there are a lot of invasive species,” said Devin Dahlstrom, 15.
Some of the native plants will be used by the KBIC tribe as one of the final the steps in the clean up of Sand Point Beach on Keweenaw Bay that was polluted about 90 years ago with stamp sands from the Mass Mill that refined copper four miles to the north along Lake Superior.
The indigenous plants will attract a wide range of wildlife to the 35 acres left barren by the stamp sands at Sand Point, said Warner, adding “it’s been covered with a 6 to 10-inch thick soil cap.”
The first tribal Brownfield cleanup site in the Midwest, the KBIC was honored by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for restoring Sand Point. Plans for the prime recreation area include a nature tail, restoring a historic lighthouse, swimming, camping, boating, picnic areas and fishing ponds, Warner said.
“The problem with invasive plant species is also cause for concern,” Warner said. “It’s nice to do something other than just watch it happen.”
“The tribe has always taken a stand that they want to seed – that they want propagation of the native species,” Ravindra said. “ They want to protect the native species and keep this area the way it is now, rather than having the exotics (plants) come in and destroying what we have established.”
“It’s out in the public view so it would bring awareness to people all around of the trouble that the pollinators are in and what they can being doing to help – the kind of plants that maybe they can be bringing back to their own home gardens – ways that they can be helping,” Ravindran said.
Warner said the KBIC tribe “works on projects like this for many reasons, to assist with providing some education and fun activity for young people, to help educate people, and to try to get a positive resource impact in motion.”
“A lot of human impact on the environment is negative,” Warner said. “We need to work sometimes to put some positive in motion.”
Appearing on a California radio show, a USFS botanist praised the KBIC and Zaagkii Project because native plants “are important sources of pollen and nectar” that make pollinators “very effective.”
“During all the time that these bees and butterflies are active and not dormant is real important,” said Jan Schultz, botany and non-native species program leader at the USFS eastern region office in Milwaukee. “So they’ve got something literally to eat – from the time they emerge – to the time they go back into their caves or cracks in the trees.”
Schultz said “another issue is the amount of chemicals that we use for gardening, and for lawn control.”
“The chemicals many times are not very discriminant, and so they will kill these pollinators as well as the undesirable species,” Schultz said. “So it’s really important for people to think ‘Gee, do I really need to use that?’ ”
The USFS says the public can help protect pollinators by being careful about what type of insecticides are used and reducing the amount of “chemicals that we use for gardening and lawn control,” Schultz said.
“The chemicals many times are not very discriminant,” she said. “They will kill these pollinators as well as the undesirable species.”
“It’s really important for people to think ‘Gee, do I really need to use that?’ Try to get pesticides that are more discriminant to what the offender is.”
“Apply the pesticide either really, really early in the morning ... or at dusk when the pollinators aren’t active,” Schultz said.The Zaagkii Project contributors include the Marquette Community Foundation, the Negaunee Community Fund, the Negaunee Community Youth Fund, the M.E. Davenport Foundation, the Kaufman Foundation, the Phyllis and Max Reynolds Foundation, with assistance from the Upper Peninsula Children’s Museum in Marquette and the Borealis Seed Company in Big Bay.