By SHERRY LUCAS • Photos courtesy of LINDA HITER
Each year when the Monarch butterflies pass through the Delta, traveling thousands of miles from Canada to Mexico, they receive a warm welcome from Linda Hiter of Merigold
Linda Hiter was captivated from the moment a Facebook post stopped her scrolling in her tracks. The video showed nature’s ultimate Cinderella moment as monarch butterflies emerged from the chrysalis stage at Baddour Garden Center in Senatobia.
“Oh my gosh, I had never seen that before!” she says, traces of that thrill still evident in her voice six years and hundreds of butterflies later. She wanted to go see it up close—hardly a tall order from her home in Merigold.
“It was just in Senatobia. It wasn’t like it was the Key West Butterfly Conservatory, you know?” She got a girlfriend to go along on a day trip, the first of several. The next year, Hiter invited Felicia’s Butterflies’ Linette Walters, who’d led the center’s program, to her church for a presentation after Sunday service.
“All my friends bought a chrysalis from her.” The end-of-season timing meant plenty of monarchs had just emerged. “Even my little one-hundred-year-old friend got to release one for the first time in her life.”
Hiter’s interest took flight, too, and she plunged into the hobby with recommended books and Facebook groups. “I just found that if you plant what they eat and what they lay eggs on, they will show up.”
Monarch population decline is linked to habitat loss—the milkweed that’s key for caterpillars. Generally, only about 10 percent of a monarch female’s four hundred eggs survive. Wasps, ants, praying mantises, and birds are natural predators, Hiter says. “And that’s not even mentioning chemicals.
“That’s all we do—put chemicals out all the time. There’s got to be something that we can do for the environment that’s better. Got to be, since we cannot farm without chemicals.”
Hiter began planting the habitat monarch butterflies are looking for. “They have some sort of innate instinct to just zero in on where it is and fly down to it. It’s just crazy—I love it, though.”
That first year, she had a single milkweed plant. “Now, I’ve probably got hundreds.”
Her start wasn’t without mishaps. The first batch of eggs she gathered wouldn’t make it past her porch. She’d nestled the leaves with their tiny eggs in plastic shoeboxes close by, to keep an eye on the process. “I didn’t realize I had the mosquito sprayers still working from the year before on my porch—I had little caterpillars, and the next day, they were all dead. I cried and I cried, ‘I’m no good at this!’”
That would change. Her husband, Park, built her a little butterfly house in the yard. She raised a few there, but there were too many nooks and crannies for caterpillars to get out and wasps and spiders to get in. So she took the mosquito sprayers out and brought in some pop-up hampers that’ve worked well. Plants and eggs go in, and she swaps in more milkweed as needed for hungry caterpillars.
A journal records her progress. In 2018, she released about twenty monarch butterflies, then thirty-five in 2019. When 2020’s COVID-19 pandemic had her working from home (she teaches dental hygiene at Mississippi Delta Community College), Hiter released 127 butterflies. With the process down pat, even a return to work didn’t slow her down. This past year, she released 166 monarchs.
Before all this, it’d been a long time since she’d seen anything other than clouded sulfur butterflies, which are among the most common. As her butterfly studies intensified, so did her plantings to attract more than just monarchs. “I’m amazed,” she says, going down a list of sightings that include zebra swallowtails, eastern black swallowtails, giant swallowtails, a tiger swallowtail, pipevine swallowtails, spicebush swallowtails, Gulf fritillaries, question mark butterflies, eastern commas, painted ladies, red admirals, red-spotted purples, cabbage whites, pearl crescents, blue azures, and more.
“I haven’t had any viceroys and queens yet. I’ll be working toward that,” she says. “It just depends on what you plant. You’d be so surprised—a lot of it is stuff you do plant.” Queen Anne’s lace has been the biggest contributor to getting swallowtails back, she says. “You see that on the side of the road, and you see butterflies, driving down the highway. I dodge ‘em, if I can.”
With her butterfly bounty, she’s keen to delay mowing, just to give the pretty population a chance to tap clover and dandelion nectar in spring. “Thank God I don’t live in town!” she jokes.
It’s tough to say precisely what it is about monarchs that has captivated her so or to rationalize this much effort and expense for an insect, lovely though its fleeting presence may be. Perhaps it’s just a capsule view to a miracle.
“I can’t really explain it,” Hiter says. “It’s just beautiful. It’s amazing that a beautiful monarch butterfly can emerge from the teensiest, tiniest, one-millimeter shell you’ve ever seen in your life.
“It’s just looking at God’s creation and how he paints things—it’s just beautiful. If they’re newly emerged, they have to dry their wings for about four hours, and you don’t want to mess with them. But at about the three-and-a-half to four-hour point, actually, they’ll stay on your hand a minute before they fly away.”
While these pretty creatures don’t recognize her as their protector, “they do recognize my yard, I believe, because of the milkweed.” A grant from Natural Resources Conversation Service helped plant seed for milkweed and nectar flowers in an acre-long strip in her yard and a nearby several-acres patch that her husband could no longer reach to farm.
The insects’ ephemeral charm resonates with points in her own past. She remembers moments from her childhood trying to distinguish a monarch from a viceroy butterfly, but they flitted too fast for her to figure it out.
She’s no good at growing things from seed, she says, but her dad, a farmer in Shelby, was brilliant at it. “If Daddy was still alive, he could be my milkweed supplier!” she says, and she’d no longer have to drive all over for plants. When Hiter’s daughter asked her to go through some of her late mother’s costume jewelry, she discovered a necklace covered with tiny butterflies. “There you go; there’s a God wink. Mama’s saying, ‘I like your butterflies.’”
Her husband loves this, too, she says, and knows so much about it by now that when a visitor asks a butterfly question, he starts answering.
Monarchs fly in nearly the same pattern they always have—a flyway from Canada and the Northeast to the plains and down through Texas. “Mississippi is just a little bit away from that, but we’re starting to get that pattern a little bit more here,” she says.
Hiter registered her own monarch waystation on monarchwatch.org. “I’m, like, the only little dot in the Mississippi Delta on the map.” That was enough for a woman from Indianola to find her and invite her to their garden club for a talk. And, oh, could they visit her garden too? “Oh no, uh uh,” a surprised Hiter replied. “I don’t have anything but weeds out here in the country! It’s not a garden center kind of a field trip.”
But that was an idea. In 2020, her husband helped landscape a little area “so when people come out here, it does look nice,” she says, laughing. “I didn’t realize how many people wanted to come out and see things like that.”
It’s the same desire that put her on this track and that’s pulled people to witness the monarch migration all the way to a forest in Mexico. She’s good with catching them on the fly, closer to home.
“I’m just enjoying doing what I’m doing in my yard.” Others are too. “I can’t tell you how many people have released butterflies—either they want to just show their kids the process—or some people want to come release one for somebody they’ve lost.
“We don’t do anything special. I just kind of stand back and let them just ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’ over it. It’s like seeing a red bird on your windowsill.” The joy and smiles it brings to people’s faces is special, sweet, and worth the effort, she says.
“I think it’s great because the more we do, the better we’re going to be,” for pollinators, for ecosystems, and for the pure enjoyment butterflies bring.
