South Texas Butterfly Sanctuary Threatened By Trump's Border Wall

NPR ^ | December 3, 20185:23 PM ET | Sam Gringlas

[dennisw]

President Trump is pushing for more money to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. The debate could come to a head as Congress nears a deadline to fund parts of the government. Some sections of the border already have a wall. And in many areas, building more wall means cutting through private property. In South Texas, NPR's Cristina Cala and Sam Gringlas visited a place where that conflict is already playing out.

SAM GRINGLAS, BYLINE: We're just looking at dozens and dozens of these red and black butterflies.

CHRISTINA CALA, BYLINE: Like a cloud of butterflies - just one right after the other.

GRINGLAS: The National Butterfly Center in Mission, Texas, hugs the banks of the Rio Grande River. It has a visitor center, hiking trails, gardens - all on 100 acres of land at the end of a long dirt road.

MARIANNA TREVINO-WRIGHT: These are queens. And this one right here is a soldier...

CALA: That's Marianna Trevino-Wright, executive director of the sanctuary. She says this part of the Rio Grande Valley has more butterfly species than anywhere in North America.

TREVINO-WRIGHT: Every day I come to work, it's like going on a safari.

GRINGLAS: Right before the midterm elections, the Trump administration announced it had awarded contracts to build six miles of border wall in Hidalgo County, Texas. It will be one of the first new stretches of wall built under President Trump. Trevino-Wright says the wall will be constructed up to a mile back from the river, basically cutting the butterfly sanctuary in half.

TREVINO-WRIGHT: So this is it.

GRINGLAS: So all this land in between here, the river and where we started out by the levee, that's going to maybe be closed off to you.

TREVINO-WRIGHT: It's going to be a no man's land. It's going to be border patrols' enforcement zone. They will clear everything. One agent told me, why would we leave even one bush for someone to hide under?

GRINGLAS: Customs and Border Protection denies that it plans to completely clear-cut the land. It also says that property owners who need access to the land between the river and the wall can have it.

CALA: The Butterfly Center doesn't have a lot of options to stop the law. The federal government can claim private lands for public use through a legal process called eminent domain. The government has used eminent domain many times before to build other stretches of the border while under previous administrations. Trevino-Wright gets that. But she was shocked when last year she found workmen wielding chainsaws, cutting down trees and mowing down brush to survey the land.

[IronJack]

Are we planning to hold America bostave to a bunch of butterflies?

[Noamie]

Solution: Erect large solar panel farm. Burn them to a crisp. Once they are all dead, erect wall.

[butlerweave]

Maybe the Butterflies would Love a Wall

[blueunicorn6]

Wait a minute!

There was just an article about how CNN wants us to eat bugs.

Now, they’re worried about some butterflies having to get a realtor?

I call baloney!

What does CNN want us to do?

Move the butterflies to Atlanta so they can eat them?

Filthy butterfly biters.

[AFret.]

First it was Snowflakes, now Butterflies...what’s next?

[Sacajaweau]

The GoFundMe scam is alive and well.

[Puppage]

God forbid they fly OVER the wall!

[TLI]

The letter and accompanying maps also outlined a 150-foot-wide “enforcement zone” south of the wall, where “all vegetation… will be cleared.”

But these walls and this open space is OK...

.

[John S Mosby]

Butterflies can fly-— OVER the wall and THROUGH any fence-— to follow their mating pheremones through the air.

This is NOT a challenge to their habitat.

This BS is sort of like the crapola against the Alaskan Oil Pipeline heating up the tundra permafrost and killing off the Elk. The warm pipelines (warm oil flowing through it) actually ATTRACTED the elk and other critters to the pipeline area— where they SURVIVED supercold winters and increased their population as a result. The data on this is irrefutable.

Butterflies will not be wiped out by a wall/fence.

[Sequoyah101]

Oh horseshit. Butterflies are free. They can fly. Fly away.

[R_Kangel]

...... Just build the wall up to the sanctuary borders ..... After a month or so of stampeding Illegals destroying the beloved Butterfly Sanctuary .... They will be begging to have the wall built

[dfwgator]

Now I’ve got that Elton John song in my head.

[gspurlock]

If they move the flowers to the U.S. side of the wall, the butterflies will follow. Um, they know how to fly.

I move plants around in my garden all of the time and they do just fine. Each year I get more butterflies and even now some hummingbirds.

[John S Mosby]

Correction— in Alaska that was the migrating Caribou population— they hung around when calving— and the baby caribou had a huge survival rate vs. freezing to death or getting isolated and killed by wolves, coyotes and bear.

an answers.com Question/answer: http://www.answers.com/Q/Did_the_alaskan_pipeline_have_an_effect_on_the_caribou_population

[relictele]

The clue’s in the name - butterflies as in flies as in fly as in three-dimensional travel.

NPR is sad and desperate - and juvenile.

[hal ogen]

So butterflies can fly. Move their “preserve”. Anyway, I bet some of them are illegal alien invader butterflies. Catch and deport them.

[Cicero]

Well, before we go any further, we ought to consider the parasites and germs that live on those butterflies. What about them? What will the Wall do to THEM?

[ProtectOurFreedom]

If those butterflies REALLY sought sanctuary, they would be in San Francisco. Does anybody really believe they are seeking sanctuary in TEXAS?

[max americana]

hand me a flamethrower and ill burn the stupid butterflies.

No more problems..

[GingisK]

Everybody knows that butterflies can't go over walls. Besides, I don't care if butterfly families are separated. They can start new ones on both sides of the wall they can't freely overfly.

What a crock.