The Mast-Head: Astride the Wind

Abby Jane Brody, The Star’s gardening columnist, came into the upstairs office this week and told us about a horde of beetles that had descended on the milkweed in the native plant garden at Clinton Academy, next door. Milkweed borers, she said, make their living on the plants that give them their name, poking a hole in the stalks to lay their eggs. The adults, as I saw when I went outside to have a look, feast on the leaves and seedpods.

Milkweed is a key source of food for monarch butterflies, which, like the beetles, are an eye-catching orange and black. Abby Jane said she had seen few to no monarchs in the garden this year. This was not the story Sunday at Atlantic Avenue Beach in Amagansett, where I went with two of my kids and some old friends and newer acquaintances for a late summer afternoon swim.

The wind was moderately strong, coming from the northwest, and one after another, monarchs came along the beach. They were flying sideways, with their heads pointed into the wind, as many as one every minute or two at times. Dragonflies seemed to accompany them, though moving more deliberately and in greater numbers. It made a pleasing spectacle, a daytime analogue for a meteor shower perhaps in the way we waited for one to appear and then loudly announced its arrival.

For our son, Ellis, who is 5, the urge to chase the monarchs and follow their wobbling paths to the west was too strong. He paid no mind to his older sister as she yelled that he should leave them alone. But try as he did, he was not able to put his hands on one.

Abby Jane was relieved to hearabout our beach sightings of monarchs. There have been reports in the news that their numbers are threatened. She suggested that I take some milkweed pods home to seed a patch of our own. She also said I should catch one of the beetles to show the kids, which I did; they were briefly impressed.

It had been a weekend for monarch sightings. On Saturday, I was among a small group who buried a box of Deborah Ann Light’s ashes at the foot of a pin oak on the Quail Hill preserve in Amagansett. There is plenty of milkweed there on the slope of a small field otherwise at rest. As each of us took a turn placing a white rose on Deborah’s box, and then shoveling it over with earth, a monarch flitted over and back.

It is remarkable that these small, fragile insects can get much of anywhere, flying astride the wind in their deceptively purposeless way, up and down, jogging back and then forward again. And yet they do. Almost as soon as one appeared over us as we went solemnly about our work, it was gone, riding sideways on the wind toward some destination we could only guess.