BirdCapeMay.org

LOUISE ZEMAITIS

Local artist, illustrator, naturalist, expert birder and butterflier, speaker, tour guide, Louise Zemaitis has been a familiar face to Cape May birders for more than twenty years. Louise is the coordinator of the Monarch Monitoring Project, founded by Dick Walton and conducted every fall in Cape May. She is the curator of the CMBO art gallery in Goshen, probably the best place to see and buy natural history art in New Jersey. Louise and her husband Michael O’Brien have recently signed on as leaders with Victor Emanuel Nature Tours (VENT) and are scheduled for upcoming trips to Belize, Antarctica, Baja, Adak, the Galapagos, and other storied destinations. In addition to regular birding tours, they specialize in “Birds and Butterflies” tours.

On a clear morning in late September I met Louise and Michael at the home of Bill and Edie Schuhl on Coral Avenue in Cape May Point, and the place was jumping. This is the nerve center of the monarch monitoring operation, where the butterflies are processed (tagged, weighed, sexed, locations noted, examined for wear and tear, and fat layers assessed). Among the busy people I met was Brad Smith, a biologist and the 2007 field technician for the project, who also happens to be Louise’s elder son.  The conversations between the workers are mostly incomprehensible to an outsider.

RR:  Would you mind just telling me, a neophyte, what you are doing?  All this activity and jargon seems so incomprehensible.

LZ:  Well, we’ll have to start at the beginning. This is sort of starting in the middle. The Monarch Monitoring Project is a combination of several things. We’ve been counting Monarchs since 1991…doing a census route three times a day in September and October. Each census is a five-mile driving route where we count all the Monarchs we see and come up with a figure—the number of Monarchs per hour— each day. All of our results are posted on Dick Walton’s website, and seasonal reports can also be found on CMBO’s BirdCapeMay website.

In addition to the census, we tag Monarchs throughout the season and, three times a week, we weigh 20 male and 20 female Monarchs and try to recapture them to check for weight gain or loss. The weighed Monarchs get colored tags (instead of the normal white tags) so we can recognize them in the field. Today we’re walking around with coolers and little glassine envelopes as we gather butterflies to bring to the lab.
 
RR:  Was this done at all in the past?

LZ:  Dick Walton started the census in 1991. I joined the project in 1992 when we started tagging. We’ve been weighing monarchs since 2001.

RR:  How much does a Monarch butterfly weigh?

LZ:  Less than a gram; the one we just weighed was 0.554 grams.

RR:  And how many butterflies do you tag in a season?

LZ:  It varies…3000…7000…every year is different. Since we’ve been weighing Monarchs in recent years, we’ve tagged fewer but we feel we are learning more.

RR:  Does Michael do this with you regularly? 
LZ:  Yes. He’s a volunteer and, yes, he’s been doing this ever since I met him. He doesn’t do the actual tagging, but he loves to catch—and count; he’ll count anything. The man was born to count.

RR:  Monarchs seem to migrate south continent-wide, not just in Cape May. Do some of these Monarchs migrate out to sea?  Where are the ones I see offshore going? Or trying to go…are they just blown offshore?

LZ:  Yes, Monarchs do migrate south all across the continent. I liken the migration of the Monarchs to that of Broad-winged Hawks. They use the same conditions, they thermal, they need land to thermal, they follow the prevailing winds going around the Gulf to Mexico…it’s a circum-gulf migration. Every winter I find myself at the bottom of Florida in the Keys…and what do I see?  Broad-winged Hawks, and I also see Monarchs.  But just because you see a few Monarchs doesn’t mean that they all want to go to south Florida. We do have a recovery of a Cape May-tagged Monarch from San Salvador. But there’s absolutely no evidence of a significant ocean migration.

Several leaf blowers start up in a nearby yard and quickly drown out our conversation. (“Leaf blowers are worse for global warming than anything else!”)

LZ:  What I mean to say is that most of these coastal butterflies intend to get to Mexico.  When we started this project some scientists thought that we weren’t going to get any recoveries in Mexico…but we have.  Like the birds, it’s not necessarily the end of their lives because the Monarchs find themselves on the coast. The coastal route is probably more risky but many obviously make it to Mexico.

Louise and Michael, nets in hand, head off into the neighborhood.

LZ:  We spend our days walking around the Point, and showing people the butterflies in their yards, and teaching how to create a butterfly garden, and many locals have come around.  Some have won trophies for their gardens; almost everyone is now aware of gardening for butterflies and birds.

RR:  Have you gotten to know a lot of people at the Point?

LZ:  Sure…and I have lived in Cape May Point at two locations-once near Lily Lake.  And I worked in the CMBO bookstore here for five years, and my kids grew up and went to school here; they were born in Pennsylvania but grew up here. My son Alec is at Temple University, and is also a musician. Brad majored in biology and minored in art.

Louise and Michael catch Monarchs and examine them for tags and other marks, assessing condition. Some are quite ragged and faded. 

LZ:  This male is not going to Mexico.

RR:  How do you tell a male Monarch from a female? 

LZ:  There’s a spot—a scent gland—on the hindwing…here’s a male, and the spot.  It’s a pheromone pouch…all of the male milkweed butterflies have this pouch.

RR:  And what else do you look for?

LZ:  I assess the girth, the fat content of the butterfly. Fat is really important to the Monarchs, because that’s what they need to build up in order to survive the winter. There is not a whole lot of food in the mountains of Mexico…they need to tank up…they’re essentially going into cold storage for the winter once they get to Mexico.

RR:  So they’re living in the winter in Mexico on stored fat?

LZ:  Pretty much… The reason for their migration is like the birds’. They spread through the U.S. and southern Canada for better reproductive success, then retreat to Mexico to survive the winter.

RR:  Are Monarchs dependent throughout their range on milkweed?

LZ:  Yes. You only find breeding Monarchs where there’s milkweed…naturally occurring or where it’s been introduced.

RR:  Just Asclepias (milkweeds), or other plants in the milkweed family?  Dogbane, or something?

LZ:  Just Asclepias, and there are over one hundred species inNorth America.

RR:  Is anyone else tagging Monarchs?

LZ:  Oh yes, there’s a nation-wide group called Monarch Watch, based out of the University of Kansas; Chip Taylor is heading up that project.
 
RR:  Do you see tags from other operations?

LZ:  Yes, we see ones from Monarch Watch, circular disks that are placed on the middle of the hind wing and don’t require the scale removal that we do when we place our over-the-wing tags.

We come across a Monarch caught in a spider’s web; it is much the worse for wear and moribund.

LZ:  The spider didn’t get it, but it’s exhausted.

RR:  So this one’s probably not going to Mexico?

LZ:  We caught this one before and weighed it, and it was emaciated then…so, no, it will probably hang around here, not going anywhere, and may get caught in another spider’s web.

RR:  If you see a really good bird do you drop everything and go after it?

LZ:  (Laughs). Sure, we’re all birders, too. People always ask if we miss things hanging out in the yards at Cape May Point, but we don’t—we had 14 species of warblers in this tree on Saturday morning. (A Peregrine flies over).

RR:  Where did you grow up?

LZ:  My father was a college professor, and we moved around.  I was born in Easton, Pennsylvania, and we went to West Virginia for a few years, to Morgantown.  I was the kid in the woods with all the Golden Nature Guides; I liked it all.  I went to high school in Chester, Pennsylvania, and to the Tyler School of Art and got a fine arts degree from Temple.

RR:  (To Michael O’Brien).  How long have you been doing this?

MO:  Basically ever since I met Louise, since 1995. I did the Sea Watch in ‘95 and never left Cape May…I like to do the census work and running around catching butterflies. Louise, I, and usually a seasonal intern will do the censusing work when Dick Walton isn’t here…

RR:  So have you gotten more interested in anything else since you’ve been here?  I know it’s birds, and now butterflies…

MO:  Well, it’s migration in general that really interests me.  And it all fits together, birds and butterflies, dragonflies, fish, whales—it’s all related. You learn about one, you learn about the others…the Merlins are going after the dragonflies, the gannets are going after the fish.

With the magnified view of migration that you get in Cape May, you really get a feel for what migrates, what doesn’t, and how quickly migration evolves. Even introduced birds that have been here a hundred years, fifty years…some are now migrating. Starlings, House Finches…you’d think they are just non-migratory permanent residents…but selective forces inspire many to migrate…and you can see it all happen here.

We return to the Schuhl’s yard, and to me the yard and the Point have become a Wonderland.  Louise points out a calling Southern Gray Treefrog, and a Monarch caterpillar that’s “gone on walkabout.” She shows me a living Monarch’s wing, which bears the clear impression of a bird’s bite ( Vireo?). “This is a red tropical milkweed—the Monarchs go crazy for it, they’re still laying eggs on it.”

There are chrysalides in various forms of transformation. In the butterfly bushes I see my first Long-tailed Skipper of the year, and an Ocola Skipper, a species I’ve seen only once before—a block away.  Ailanthus Webworm Moth.  Merlin.  Cloudless Sulphur.  A big red unfamiliar darner. Hummingbird Moth. Fiery Skipper. Bobolinks.  There’s a good falcon flight going on overhead. Brad shows me an Ambush Bug, which can change color depending on the flower it’s on.  Nearby, a native species of mantis (Carolina?) is devouring a Monarch.  Esoteric, erudite, exciting fun talk is floating around…

Two groups—one led by CMBO associate naturalist George Myers, the other by associate naturalist and guide Mark Garland—walk by and are quickly snared by the action in the yard.

LZ:  Mark just watched a Peregrine go out to “The Rips”, catch a Forster’s Tern, and then carry it in and eat it on the beach.

RR:  I think I first saw you on the Cape May birding scene in the early ‘80s?

LZ:   I started coming to Cape May with my now ex-husband in 1982, and we rented a house in ’85.  Every year thereafter we’d come for the hawks, and I learned a lot on the hawkwatch, first with Frank Nicoletti…and then I started looking at everything else.  There were so many wonderful people that I learned from—Fred Mears, Dave Sibley, Shawneen Finnegan, Paul Lehman, and many, many others.

RR:  Tell me about your famous Thursday night get-togethers.

LZ: Those Thursday nights!—we started doing them in the early ‘90s, and it was at first a gathering of the few year-round people…Vince Elia, Pat and Clay Sutton, Jim and Deb Dowdell, Joan Walsh and David Sibley…later Paul and Shawneen…we’d have wine and beer and slide shows and games…dinner evolved into potlucks after so many people started coming.  Now as many as 30-60 or more come and we rotate from house to house.

There’s an open door policy; anyone can come…

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A Day in the Field with Louise
	Bill & Edie Schuhl's: A Prize-worthy Garden on Cape May Point “This is the nerve center of the monarch monitoring operation, where the butterflies are processed (tagged, weighed, sexed, locations noted, examined for wear and tear, and fat layers assessed).”
	"Netting" a Monarch Butterfly Brad Smith, a biologist and the 2007 field technician for the project, demonstrates how Monarchs are captured so that important data can be recorded.
	Tagging Monarchs Every year 3000 to 7000 Monarchs are captured and processed on Cape May Point thanks to devoted volunteers like those shown here.
	Data is Collected You can tell the sex of a Monarch because the male’s have a spot—a scent gland or pheromone pouch—on the hindwing
	Prep Work Scales are removed in preparation for the over-the-wing tag.
	Over-the-wing Tag The tags allow researchers to track the migration of Monarch Butterflies. "We do have a recovery of a Cape May-tagged Monarch from San Salvador."
	The Butterfly Lab "In addition to the census, we tag Monarchs throughout the season and, three times a week, we weigh 20 male and 20 female Monarchs and try to recapture them to check for weight gain or loss." Monarchs weigh less than a gram.
	Colored Tag "The weighed Monarchs get colored tags (instead of the normal white tags) so we can recognize them in the field."
	A South-bound Journey "Monarchs do migrate south all across the continent. I liken the migration of the Monarchs to that of Broad-winged Hawks. They use the same conditions, they thermal, they need land to thermal, they follow the prevailing winds going around the Gulf to Mexico…it’s a circum-gulf migration."

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Photo Credit: Special thanks to Rick Radis, Mark Garland, Louise Zemaitis and Michael O'Brien for use of their Monarch photos and the taggers in action.