I mentioned a few days ago that Garrison Keillor, in his "Writer's Almanac," keeps me in daily touch with some of the notable birthdays, today including those of two artists whose works have nourished me for a whole lifetime, Henry James and Leonardo da Vinci.
Other than his more famous depiction of Vitruvian Man, and his image of an old man that many have imagined as a self-portrait, I've been most drawn over the years to Leonardo's sketch of St. Anne.
Also, reading and reflecting on Andrew Revkin's essay in The New York Times yesterday on the plight of monarch butterflies, I remembered my first — 16-year-old — driving adventure from Los Angeles up the coast to Monterey, which I imagined primarily as a home of monarch butterflies and of Doc and the other characters of Cannery Row, one of my favorite books by John Steinbeck. Monarchs and canneries there were, but alas no Doc.
Monarch butterflies are indeed endangered, and serious efforts are getting underway to restore the habitats along their long north-south migratory paths. As Michael Wines wrote in the Times late last autumn,
"The number of monarchs that completed the largest and most arduous migration this fall, from the northern United States and Canada to a mountainside forest in Mexico, dropped precipitously, apparently to the lowest level yet recorded. In 2010 at the University of Northern Iowa, a summertime count in some 100 acres of prairie grasses and flowers turned up 176 monarchs; this year, there were 11."
A report by the Xerces Society adds, "Monarch butterfly numbers have declined by 90% over the last two decades, and the loss of milkweed—the necessary host plant for monarch caterpillars—is one of the key factors responsible for the decline." Richard Conniff wrote a recent article in Yale Environment 360 about what farmers and gardeners can do to restore the habitat of monarchs and other pollinators (notably including honeybees, whose numbers are diminishing with comparable seriousness).