Once, he motioned me off the porch swing where I was reading to show me a monarch feeding on the blossoms. When my husband’s father cut the field, he mowed carefully around the flowers. The plant is sometimes called orange glory, which suits it. Each tiny blossom had one row of tangerine petals stretching down and another row stretching up, like little dancers with raised arms. It was waist high in places, and covered in starburst bunches of brilliant orange flowers. From there I could see thick patches of butterfly weed, a variety of milkweed that grows wild on their hilltop property. While Egertson was retrieving the lasagna pan, I was a continent away, sitting for hours every day on my in-laws’ porch in Massachusetts. A paperclip weighs a gram a monarch weighs about half that. For the first time she could remember, she hadn’t seen a single one. In the weeks leading up to her trip to Brookings, she’d scouted for flickers of orange as she traversed the land trust. If she succeeded, the monarchs hatched under her care would be the first she’d seen that year. It would be up to Egertson to usher the butterflies into life. Waiting for them in Brookings was a makeshift incubator for 110 monarch eggs: a foil lasagna pan lined with damp paper towels to keep the milkweed leaves placed inside it from wilting. They packed their kids into the car and started driving. She called her husband and asked if he could skip work for a day or two. She lives in the city of Bend, almost 300 miles away from Brookings. A trained ecologist, Egertson is the stewardship director of a land trust in central Oregon. That’s how Amanda Egertson heard about the eggsplosion. “I lost 15 pounds because I forgot to feed myself.”Ī friend of Beyer’s sent out a grassroots SOS, begging anyone in Oregon with experience hand-rearing monarchs to come and take some of the remaining eggs off her hands. and wouldn’t finish feeding them until six at night,” she told me. The tiny creatures do nothing but eat and evacuate, and Beyer spent every day harvesting milkweed to go in one end and sweeping away the droppings that came out the other. As the caterpillars hatched, she gave her life over to their care. Based on other people’s reports from their own gardens, she estimates that there were 5,000 more across Brookings.īeyer dutifully gathered the eggs laid on her property and put them in a maze of mesh crates she’d set up on the small deck of her 400-square-foot apartment. “Every milkweed plant”-the only flora that monarch caterpillars eat upon hatching-“got egg-bombed.” Over the next several weeks, Beyer counted nearly 2,700 eggs in her yard. Soon the monarchs had blanketed Brookings in “the second eggsplosion,” as Beyer put it. A person could be taking the trash out or crossing a parking lot and see a flash, like a struck match, from the corner of their eye. She released them into the wild, and Brookings, with a human population of just 6,500, was suddenly ablaze with orange wings. Before long she had hundreds of caterpillars, then hundreds of butterflies. She snipped the laden leaves and brought them inside, to shield the eggs from wind, rain, and predators. Beyer wanted the marvel she had witnessed from her deck to have a happier ending. Under normal conditions, fewer than 5 percent of monarch eggs survive to adulthood. Most female monarchs disperse their eggs as widely as possible, but for unknowable reasons, Ovaltine laid almost 600 in Beyer’s yard.
Beyer, a petite retiree with a trace of red in her gray hair, is part of a local group who promote butterfly-friendly gardening practices-planting native flowers, for instance, and forgoing pesticides. Come fall, rather than produce offspring, it migrates south. The last generation of the year is different. Every spring and summer, several generations of butterflies breed, lay eggs, and die, each in the span of about a month. Clustered together on the green leaves, they looked like blemishes, as if the milkweed had sprouted a case of adolescent acne.īrookings sits on Oregon’s rugged coast, and squarely within the monarch’s habitat. Each off-white bump was no larger than the tip of a sharpened pencil. She and a friend named it Ovaltine, inspired by ovum, for the way it encrusted the milkweed in Beyer’s garden with eggs. Beyer recognized it by a scratch on one wing. The phenomenon that some people in Brookings, Oregon, would later call a miracle began in early July 2019, when the same monarch butterfly appeared in Holly Beyer’s yard almost every day for two weeks. Nora Caplan-Bricker is a journalist, essayist, and critic whose work has appeared in Slate, Harper’s, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Magazine, among other publications.
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