Sahli's pollinator program halts after someone frees monarch butterflies prematurely
CHIPPEWA TWP. — Western Pennsylvanian efforts to help an endangered species of butterfly that many insect experts fear could go extinct were clipped earlier this month.
A critical part of Sahli Nature Park’s pollinator conservation program in Chippewa Township, Beaver County, is temporarily on hold after a visitor recently quietly released most of the park’s monarch butterflies.
Park co-manager Pam Varga was preparing to celebrate Sahli’s 10-year anniversary last weekend when she returned to find two dozen greenhouse butterflies had been prematurely let loose into the wild.
Varga believes whoever released the monarchs did so “in a misguided attempt to liberate” the butterflies raised in captivity.
“They were making a statement,” she said. “I had the butterflies in two separate cages, and they opened the cages, took them all out and closed the cages. I know it wasn’t someone just fooling around, because we had three butterflies that couldn't fly very well and they were very carefully placed on their food and left in the cage.”
Rather than saving the insects, the person responsible will instead cause hundreds of caterpillars to die in the coming weeks, Varga said.
“Those butterflies were just about to lay eggs,” she said. “In our greenhouse, the caterpillars have a 90-95% survival rate. The offspring of the butterflies released have only a 3% survival rate. Whoever let them go has caused the death of a lot of butterflies because each one of the females — and there were probably 15 — will lay 300 to 700 eggs. Only 3% of them are going to survive.”
Sahli’s pollinator conservation project is designed to help replenish butterfly and bee populations essential for ecological survival. Much of the work focuses on teaching visitors about the importance of pollinators and how to build pollinator gardens at home.
“I was absolutely stunned,” Varga said. “I’m devastated, those butterflies are like my children. I couldn't wrap my head around why someone would do that. Someone who doesn't understand what we’re all about and doesn’t understand the consequences of what they did.”
The Beaver County park gets its caterpillars from Kansas-based nonprofit Monarch Watch, raising each generation in the greenhouse on Milkweed grown on site. The adult butterflies are released into the wild within five days, Varga said. The park usually hosts butterfly release ceremonies in July, August and September, giving children firsthand experience with monarchs.
The International Union for Conservation of Nature last month reclassified the migratory monarch butterfly as an endangered species amid habitat loss, climate change and pesticide exposure.
The western monarch population, less studied and more at risk, has plummeted 99.9 percent in recent decades, from around 10 million in the 1980s to just 1,914 in 2021, according to the IUCN. The eastern population declined by 84 percent between 1996 and 2014.
It’ll take Varga at least a few weeks to relaunch the butterfly program. Although it’s late in the season, she was able to secure some caterpillars from Monarch Watch slated to arrive next week. From there, it’ll take two to three weeks before adult butterflies are back in the greenhouse. Hopefully, the park will have one more release this year in September. That generation will migrate thousands of miles to Mexico until spring.
Although the greenhouse will be home to a new generation of butterflies in a few weeks, Varga said the greenhouse won’t be open to the public unless she’s on-site for now.
“We will recover,” she said. “But one of the saddest things about it is instead of leaving the greenhouse open to the public, I have to keep it locked until I’m there. It denies a lot of people the opportunity to come and learn. I’m there from around 4 to 6 p.m. every day so during that time the greenhouse will be open.”
There were no video cameras in the greenhouse at the time of the incident, but Varga is working to retrieve footage from the parking lot to narrow down the suspects.
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“We’ve pinpointed a time we think it happened,” she said. “So I’m going to try to get ahold of that video. There were only three or four cars in the parking lot at that time. The person who did this has been at the park and knows what they were doing. It’s essentially an act of vandalism. Nothing was broken or injured, but they essentially stole something from us.”
Park supporters have rallied around Varga since the event, she said, with many volunteering to donate their own caterpillars to the cause.
“One of the heartwarming parts of this is when I posted it on Facebook, so many people said ‘you gave me eggs a couple months ago and helped me get started,’ or ‘I raised these butterflies with my granddaughter and we have some caterpillars we can bring to you,'" she said. "It really proved to us how much support we have for this program.”