Long Live the Kings

     Little green anoles used to be all over our Florida yards. Young persons were known to catch them and persuade them to bite onto their earlobes, where they dangled like earrings. What can I say? We didn’t have cable. Anyway, they were cute. But lately, dirty Commie brown anoles from Cuba have crowded them out. Supposedly, the green ones can escape to a higher level of shrubbery, but the brown ones EAT BABY GREEN ONES, the dirty stinking cannibal Commies. But even worse, they eat monarch butterfly larvae.

    Really. While people all over North America are cultivating milkweed, because that’s the only thing monarch larvae will eat, and paying money to be certified as Official Monarch Inn and Spa Way-Stations, ugly anoles are scoping out the milkweed and puffing out their nasty orange double chins while they wait for the microscopically tiny monarch larvae to hatch from their pinhead-sized eggs, crunch down the egg shells and fatten themselves up on milkweed leaves just enough to be interesting to ugly brown Commie anoles.

     I fumed when I learned this. I had monitored the milkweed pods until they popped open and ran like a crazy person to stuff the seeds into my pocket before they floated away on the breeze. Have you ever tried to peel hundreds of seeds’ worth of that floaty stuff that sticks to fabric like its life depends on it out of a shirt pocket? Well, have you?

     I devoted a whole raised garden bed to milkweed, planted scads of seeds and sang to the sprouts and stroked their little leaves. OK, I didn’t do that, but I did get sweaty. Monarch butterflies fluttered over the house and plunged like dive-bombers into the milkweed patch. I found eggs. I rejoiced at the sight of teeny-tiny stripey caterpillars. And they disappeared. Dirty Commie anoles.

     Enter the single-wide camper’s box mosquito net. If little kids can hatch monarchs in one of those net cage thingies, then surely I could do it on a larger scale with this thing. I hung its metal corner rings over bamboo sticks cut from the corner of the yard where we can’t get rid of the stuff. Bamboo takes over the world, in case you didn’t know. Don’t plant bamboo. Clipping shoots is a pain, but sometimes the sticks are useful. Like for hanging a box mosquito net.

     I had to kill many milkweed bugs before I sealed the net around the bottom with bricks. They are orange and black, and they lay little yellow eggs by the squillions, and they gobble milkweed. Commies. But the bed has been covered for a week or so, and today I spotted five big fat monarch larvae on the milkweed leaves. Do the chrysalis thing, little guys. Give me that thrilling marvel of Creation—or next year you can plant your own darn milkweed.