Planting milkweed at Camp Polk Meadow Preserve. Photo: Land Trust.

Land Trust and COCC Partner up to Protect Butterflies

Sep 10, 2019 by Sarah Mowry
The Land Trust and COCC are holding a mlkweed planting party from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Friday, September 13, in front of the college’s bookstore. Learn more...

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The Land Trust announced today a new partnership with COCC to help protect the monarch butterfly. Monarch butterflies are flying on a wing and a prayer these days. According to the National Wildlife Federation, the population of the once-abundant colorful invertebrate—its bold orange wings rimmed with white flecks—has declined by some 90 percent since the 1990s. A recent report in The Oregonian says that the monarch population in the western U.S. plummeted 99 percent last year, down to the low tens of thousands. Habitat loss, particularly of loss of milkweed plants, which monarch caterpillars use as a host plant to feed on, is driving this iconic species to the brink.

Monarch butterflies after emerging from their chrysalides. Photo: Land Trust.
Monarch butterflies after emerging from their chrysalides. Photo: Land Trust.
Pushing back is a new partnership between Central Oregon Community College (COCC) and the Deschutes Land Trust. With a plot of landscaping on the Bend campus newly designated for a milkweed garden, a volunteer crew—the self-appointed “Butterfly Brigade”—from the Deschutes Land Trust is holding a planting party from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Friday, September 13, in front of the college’s bookstore. Though the volunteer crew is currently full, interested parties can visit deschuteslandtrust.org/volunteer-opps to learn more about other planting events.

“The Land Trust will provide and plant 200 native milkweed plants which are critical to the survival of monarch butterflies,” explained Mike Beaulieu, operations supervisor for COCC’s campus services department. Additional benefits of the project, Beaulieu noted, are an improvement of campus landscape aesthetics and the reduction of invasive and noxious plant species.

Sarah Mowry, outreach director at the Deschutes Land Trust, is excited to partner up with the college, a new chapter for the organization’s monarch conservation efforts. “We’ve already planted thousands of native blossoms and milkweed plants on our Preserves, but this is the first of several plantings off of our protected lands and in our community,” she said. “We are thrilled to have partners who are thinking so critically about the connections between community and the natural world.”


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