Town employee gets project rolling
By Gail Peckler-Dziki
Correspondent
Evan Kirsch had to complete a community service project to become an Eagle Scout – and he took the advice of Salem resident and town employee Judy Grasser.
“I contacted his troop and suggested a monarch way station if anyone had a project,” Judy said. “And Evan called and we got started.”
The garden was completed last summer and hopefully will begin attracting the popular butterflies.
The Salem Town Board agreed to donate one acre of land at the Salem Community Park, located on 259th Ave. It is near the passive portion of the park and close to Center Lake. A source of water is essential for a monarch way station.
Plants in the garden include various types of milkweed, goldenrod, spiderwort, blazing star and coneflower. All butterflies require two types of plants – a host plant where eggs are laid so that the caterpillar has a food source when it hatches and nectar flowers that provide food for the newly emerged butterfly.
Kirsch said he has always loved science and the outdoors and said, “I really don’t know what I am going to do, I really love math and science, but engineering seems pretty boring. I have thought about being a microbiologist, and that is definitely one of my top options.”
One of the main things Kirsch said he learned was that teamwork with good communication gets things done.
“A lot of my information came from Mrs. Grasser,” Kirsch said. “She was a huge help in completing the project.”
Kirsch said he purchased many of his seeds through a seed company (Shooting Star Native Seed) that specializes in prairie restoration. This company began in 1989 and is based in based in Spring Grove, Minnesota. Native species are important to butterflies and Shooting Star grows, cultivates and sells seeds and plants to a seven-state area in the Midwest.
The monarch watch
Orley B. “Chip” Taylor, a professor in the department of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Kansas, is the founder and director of “Monarch Watch.”
When he realized that the monarch was in trouble because of habitat loss in the 1990’s, he began this effort to create new habitats for the butterfly.
Each fall, millions of monarch butterflies migrate from the United States and Canada to areas in Mexico and California to wait out the winter. Increasing development and the used of herbicides on croplands, pastures and roadsides are causing a decline in milkweed and other nectar producing flowers that monarchs need to support their migration and general survival.
According to www.monrachwatch.org, some states have started to increase the diversity of plantings along roadsides, including milkweeds but these programs are small.