Montrealer’s efforts to monarch butterfly conservation

“The reason I rescue them is because only one out of 10 survive because of predators pesticides herbicides deforestation climate change,” said Dorval resident and preschool teacher Jennifer Bellware whose been saving monarch butterflies for over three years.

The migrating monarch butterfly is endangered and one Montrealer is taking matters into her own hands to save the majestic insect.

All it took was for Jennifer Bellware to save two caterpillars for her preschool class to fall in love with the creatures.

“I couldn’t say no, I said okay and the rest is history. I now saved over 200 of them,” said Bellware.

“You see such an evolution so quickly you know from like a little egg and in less than a month it’s this beautiful butterfly and to me that’s just priceless really to be able to witness that.”

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Last week the International Union for Conservation of Nature has added the migratory monarch butterfly to its ‘Red List of Endangered Species’.

“Climate change tends to it makes us more vulnerable to more extreme events during the year so for monarchs if they have more extreme events year and after year that will have impacts on the mortality rates and also decline of the population,” said Mission Monarch coordinator Alessandro Dieni.

“They trend to come back and know where the milkweed is and that’s the problem especially now with the Technopark mowing down 4000 milkweed plants where are there those butterflies they know where that area is where are they gonna go now?” questions Bellware.

If you some of these let it be this is the common milkweed, the host plant for monarch butterflies.

“We’re helping a lot of other butterflies or a lot of other bees or other pollinators that are using the same habitats so that’s the power of conservation when we’re trying to protect a particular species that is having an impact on multiple other species in that ecosystem,” said Dieni.

The International Monarch Monitoring Blitz – the annual event devoted to research for the preservation of the specie is running from July 29 to Aug. 7.