Wednesday, August 5, 2020 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon Tales from a Sisters Naturalist by Jim Anderson There’s no such thing as a free lunch Just about everyone who reads, watches or listens to nature stories is familiar with the plight of monarch butter- flies in the Western United States. Their numbers have dropped from millions to thousands in the last 20 years for a variety of reasons, most wrapped around habitat and their food plant, milkweed. Well, there I was over at Clarno, on the banks of the John Day River, visiting and delighting in the large milk- weed growing operation the Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service have teamed up on. They were growing milkweed for replanting on their lands in hopes of producing hundreds of monarch butterflies. Imagine my horror when I was photographing a very beautiful, fat and healthy caterpillar on the milkweed when suddenly a big paper wasp flew by, carrying one of the caterpillars off. My first impulse was to knock the wasp out of the sky and save the caterpil- lar, but thank goodness I checked that action and just watched it go by, headed for its huge nest in a cottonwood right alongside the monarch garden. As I watched the huge wasp nest I could see other wasps returning with their prizes, so I got out my binocs, sat down in the edge of the monarch garden to watch the show. As I was observing it, a magpie suddenly came flying through my field of vision, and as I watched it snatched one of the fully-loaded wasps out of the air. I thought of the old say- ing,