Most of Canada to receive emergency alert test today
The federal government will test its capacity to issue emergency alerts today, with the exception of Ontario, where the test will take place on May 15.
Mexican experts said Monday that 35% more monarch butterflies arrived this year to spend the winter in mountaintop forests, compared to the previous season.
Experts say the rise may reflect the butterflies’ ability to adapt to more extreme bouts of heat or drought by varying the date when they leave Mexico.
The government commission for natural protected areas said the butterflies’ population covered 2.84 hectares (7 acres) this year, compared to 2.1 hectares (5.2 acres) last year.
The annual butterfly count doesn’t calculate the individual number of butterflies, but rather the number of acres they cover when they clump together on tree boughs.
Each year the monarchs return to the United States and Canada on an annual migration that is threatened by loss of the milkweed they feed on north of the border, and deforestation in the butterfly reserves in Mexico.
Gloria Tavera, the regional director of Mexico’s Commission for National Protected Areas, said logging in the butterflies’ wintering ground rose by about 4.5% this year, to 13.9 hectares (34 acres).
However, fewer trees were lost to fire, drought or plant diseases and pests. So overall tree loss in the 2021-22 season was about 18.8 hectares (46 acres), down from 20.6 hectares ( 51 acres) in the 2020-21 season.
But environmentalist and writer Homero Aridjis, who grew up around the reserve, said “there is no reliable data for the full extent of wood extraction from the reserve,” noting that loggers often take undamaged trees, claiming they were diseased or were affected by storms.
The butterflies traditionally arrive in the mountaintop pine and fir forests west of Mexico City around the beginning of November. They normally leave for the U.S. and Canada in March.
But Tavera said that last year was unusual, because the monarchs began leaving in February; that allowed them to get out before drought and heat hit just north of border in April and May.
“They are beginning to adapt to extreme climate conditions,” Tavera said.
Strangely, this year, the butterflies stuck around in Mexico longer than usual. “They left very late. We still had butterflies in April,” Tavera said. It remains to be seen in next year's figures whether that strategy worked for them.
While activists and students in the United States and Canada have been urged to plant milkweed, to make up for the losses of the plant due to the clearance of farm and pasture land and the use of herbicides, that strategy has backfired in Mexico.
Tavera urged Mexicans not to plant milkweed in Mexico, saying it might disrupt the migration by encouraging monarchs to stick around, rather than leave for the north. She also urged people not to breed monarchs in captivity — they are sometimes released at weddings or other celebrations — saying that could spread diseases among the insects.
Jorge Rickards of the WWF environmental group said that, despite the increase this year, “this continues to be a migration phenomenon at risk.”
One bright spot was that over 160,000 tourists visited the butterfly reserves in Mexico in 2021, a 132% increase over the number that visited during the coronavirus pandemic in 2020.
The local collective farm groups that own much of the forest in the reserves depend on tourism for income, and to discourage logging.
Drought, severe weather and loss of habitat — especially of the milkweed where the monarchs lay their eggs — as well as pesticide and herbicide use, and climate change, all pose threats to the species’ migration. Illegal logging and loss of tree cover due to disease, drought and storms also continues to plague the reserves.
But Aridjis, the activist, said the reserves are also under pressure from drug cartels and illegal planting of avocado orchards, which thrive in the same general climate as the pine forests.
“There is drug trafficking, and dead bodies regularly turn up on remote paths,” Aridijis said of the area around his hometown of Contepec. “I feel like an exile from my birthplace.”
The federal government will test its capacity to issue emergency alerts today, with the exception of Ontario, where the test will take place on May 15.
Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex, has made headlines with his recent arrival in the U.K., this time to celebrate all things Invictus. But upon the prince landing in the U.K., we have already had confirmation that King Charles III won't have time to see his youngest son during his brief visit.
An Ontario man found out that a line of credit he thought was insured actually isn't after his wife of 50 years died.
After more than a century, Boy Scouts of America is rebranding as Scouting America, another major shakeup for an organization that once proudly resisted change.
A first-of-its-kind Canadian research study is working towards a major medical breakthrough for a brain disorder, believed to be caused by repeated head injuries, that can only be detected after death.
In March, Indonesian officials and local fishermen rescued 75 people from the overturned hull of a boat off the coast of Indonesia. Until now, little was known about why the boat capsized.
With Donald Trump sitting just feet away, Stormy Daniels testified Tuesday at the former president's hush money trial about a sexual encounter the porn actor says they had in 2006 that resulted in her being paid to keep silent during the presidential race 10 years later.
An Ontario woman said it would have been impossible to buy a house without her mother – an anecdote that animates the fact that over 17 per cent of Canadian homeowners born in the ‘90s own their property with their parents, according to a new report.
Canadian immigrants threatened by hostile regimes are urging parliamentarians to quickly pass the 'Countering Foreign Interference Act' so they can feel safe living in their adopted home.
A chicken farmer near Mattawa made an 'eggstraordinary' find Friday morning when she discovered one of her hens laid an egg close to three times the size of an average large chicken egg.
A P.E.I. lighthouse and a New Brunswick river are being honoured in a Canada Post series.
An Ontario man says he paid more than $7,700 for a luxury villa he found on a popular travel website -- but the listing was fake.
Whether passionate about Poirot or hungry for Holmes, Winnipeg mystery obsessives have had a local haunt for over 30 years in which to search out their latest page-turners.
Eighty-two-year-old Susan Neufeldt and 90-year-old Ulrich Richter are no spring chickens, but their love blossomed over the weekend with their wedding at Pine View Manor just outside of Rosthern.
Alberta Ballet's double-bill production of 'Der Wolf' and 'The Rite of Spring' marks not only its final show of the season, but the last production for twin sisters Alexandra and Jennifer Gibson.
A mother goose and her goslings caused a bit of a traffic jam on a busy stretch of the Trans-Canada Highway near Vancouver Saturday.
A British Columbia mayor has been censured by city council – stripping him of his travel and lobbying budgets and removing him from city committees – for allegedly distributing a book that questions the history of Indigenous residential schools in Canada.
Three men in Quebec from the same family have fathered more than 600 children.