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Stories and Photos by Greg Peterson
L’Anse, Michigan (NFIC) 11-08
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Two tribal teens participating in the KBIC Summer Youth Program use
sanding paper to smooth edges on butterfly houses that offer
butterflies a safe place to rest, a refuge from predators and a place
to reproduce.
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Millions of Monarchs will begin arriving in Mexico this fall 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.
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’engwa 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, Lindala is the director of the NMU Center for Native American Studies.
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| KBIC tribal dancer Janelle Paquin, 15, of Baraga, paints a butterfly house at the tribe’s fish hatchery. |
“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 ten times more
effective in pollinating than a honeybee,” she said. “They engage in a
particular type of pollination that’s called buzz pollination.”
“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 plant 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.”
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KBIC Natural Resource Department (NRD) Water Quality Specialist Kit Laux puts the side on a butterfly house, while KBIC NRD environment specialist Katie Kruse stretches to hold the boards straight. The butterfly refuges are lined with bark, thinner than bird houses and have seven slits to allow entry with folded wings.
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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, 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.
“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.
“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.
Marquette teens planted about 26,000 native plant 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,” 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, while talking to a group of Zaagkii Project
supporters.
A Monarch’s famous orange wings serve as a warning to birds that the butterfly doesn’t taste good, Lucas said.
“I
learned that the Viceroy butterfly mimics the patterns of a Monarch
butterfly – and tries to look like a Monarch so it doesn’t get killed,”
said Daniale Mills, 16.
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 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 along Lake Superior.
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 trail,
restoring a historic lighthouse, swimming, camping, boating, picnic
areas and fishing ponds, Warner said.
“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.”
FMI call Greg at 906-401-0109 or Rev. Magnuson at 906-2285494.
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