🎃Miss E👻🧟‍♀️

The North American Butterfly Association has some choice words for butterfly releases: "a particularly long-lasting form of environmental pollution." Harsh, but you'll see why in a minute. Commercially farmed butterflies are raised in crowded conditions that breed a parasite called OE (Ophryocystis elektroscirrha). When farmed monarchs are released, they can carry that parasite into wild populations that are already at record lows. Infected monarchs often can't emerge from the chrysalis properly, or emerge with crumpled wings they can't fly on. Disease isn't the only concern. Farmed monarchs may carry genetics poorly suited to wild survival, including disrupted migration instincts. Monarch populations have dropped roughly 80 to 90% in recent decades. The last thing they need is boxes of farmed butterflies introducing disease at weddings and funerals. If you want butterflies, plant native milkweed and nectar flowers at your new home together instead. You'll get wild butterflies in droves, the kind that belong there, for years.

A follower told me they watched a hawk grab a released doves out of the air at a funeral, right in front of the grieving family. "It wasn't inspirational." Wildlife rehabbers will tell you that's not an unusual outcome. The white birds sold for wedding and funeral releases aren't doves. They're domestic pigeons bred for appearance with no survival instincts outside a coop. When released, they have a poor ability to navigate, little to no predator awareness, and no way to find food. Hawks, cars, windows, and starvation take most of them within days. Even professional releases using trained homing pigeons kill birds. Homing pigeons can navigate, but they get picked off by raptors in flight, hit by cars when they land exhausted, and exposed to disease on the trip back. Wildlife rehabbers receive them regularly, emaciated, injured, and sick. There is no version of this where the birds fly away and live happily somewhere. The reality is a 15-second photo moment that required traumatizing a domestic animal with no ability to survive what comes next. Bubbles, sparklers, dried flower petals, and ribbon throws all photograph beautifully. None of them end up in a hawk's talons in front of a grieving family. If someone you know is planning a release, tell them. The tradition sounds meaningful, but the bird's experience of it is not.