Our Environment: “The Pigeons of Yankee Stadium” by Scott Turner
Sunday, September 29, 2019
Twice last Saturday afternoon at Yankee Stadium in The Bronx, the Toronto Blue Jays left fielder lost a routine fly ball in the September sun.
Long ago, late summer’s unfavorable sun conditions in left field at the Stadium led legendary Yankee catcher Yogi Berra to exclaim, “It gets late early out there.”
A solid sign of the shifting season is the ever-lower-in-the-sky sun, setting sooner each September day.
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTThat Saturday afternoon at the Stadium, Karen and I sat, with friends Steve and Robin, near the top of Section 421 in the Stadium’s Grandstand Level. We were about as high in the sky as you could get in the ballpark, yet with a great view of the action.
Looking out at leftfield, I observed that it was the entry point for an irregular flow of monarch butterflies and dragonflies well above the playing field. Left field is north, and the insects crossed the Stadium sky before exiting south over the façade above the stands just to the right (slightly down the first baseline) of home plate.
While watching the insects flutter or zip past, I thought of the lines, “We can't go over it. We can't go under it. Oh, no! We've got to go through it!'' from the children’s book, “We’re Going on a Bear Hunt.”
From my observations in recent weeks, this has been the best summer in years for spotting monarch butterflies in migration. For some two decades, monarch numbers plummeted primarily due to habitat loss, pesticide use, and extreme weather.
Insect populations fluctuate every year. But maybe there is something to what I’ve noticed. Per Monarch Joint Venture, a nationwide coalition dedicated to protecting monarchs, population numbers of monarchs increased 144 percent in 2018 compared to 2017 east of the Rocky Mountains.
Checking online last week, I found both increased monarch sightings and upward trends in population numbers reported for the insects from many states across the Eastern U.S. Let’s hope in these days of sinking insect, bird and fish numbers that some good news exists.
At our house, we have set aside a section of the sunny side of the garden to grow the native plant, milkweed. It is on milkweed that monarchs lay their eggs. And, it is on milkweed that newly hatched monarch caterpillars feed.
Several of our neighbors have also begun growing milkweed in their gardens. Maybe I’m wrong, but I think this collective rearing of the plants helps in some way to mitigate the loss of monarch habitat elsewhere.
It was while observing migrating monarch butterflies in Rhode Island a few years ago that I learned that some species of dragonflies also migrate.
Take the green darner. Some resident green darners don’t migrate. They complete their lifecycles in Rhode Island. But other green darner populations migrate south in late summer and fall, returning north in spring to breed.
I highly endorse the act of looking up every once and awhile, as one of the best ways to discover that there are other species sharing the same space. I would not want to doing so from left field in Yankee Stadium, where sun and shadows turn batted balls into disappearing black dots headed for your noggin.
Better to sit up in the grandstands at the Stadium—a superb perch to watch all the action on and over the field.
Scott Turner is a Providence-based writer and communications professional. For more than a decade he wrote for the Providence Journal and we welcome him to GoLocalProv.com.
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