Ms. Elman collects butterfly eggs from milkweed plants growing wild along New York City’s highways. Karine Aigner

Some of the best stories are about people who go the extra mile for others:

To Save Monarch Butterflies, They Had to Silence the Lawn Mowers

An unlikely group of New Yorkers is winning small victories in the battle to protect butterfly habitats.

The small white dot under a milkweed plant is a monarch butterfly egg. Karine Aigner

The Long Island Expressway is not generally a place people linger, unless they’re stuck in traffic.

But during the summer, Robyn Elman can often be found walking alone near the highway’s shoulder, inspecting scraggly patches of overgrown milkweed. The plant is the only source of nutrition for monarch caterpillars before they transform into butterflies.

For the past several years, Ms. Elman, 47, has been on a quest to help save monarchs, which are under consideration for the endangered species list. She does this by preventing milkweed, which grows wild in New York City, from being razed.

“I feel like we’re taking over so much of the wildlife, we’re not giving them a chance to even exist anymore,” Ms. Elman said of monarchs. Habitat loss and climate change have reduced the monarch population by more than 80 percent over the past 20 years, experts say.

Until this year, Ms. Elman’s quest had been a lonely one. But this summer, she met two like-minded people, forming something of an unlikely threesome that managed, in a humble victory, to protect 20-odd monarch habitats in Queens and the Bronx.

Ms. Elman first started thinking about the wild milkweed four years ago, when she began rearing monarchs in her backyard in the Bellerose neighborhood of Queens. She was collecting the eggs from plants growing along highways in nearby northern Queens, but often she found the plants reduced to stubs.

It was devastating, she said, finding hundreds of caterpillars and eggs obliterated.

Immediately, Ms. Elman set about talking to other environmentalists and local leaders, imploring anyone remotely interested in biodiversity to point her in the direction of the lawn mowers in charge…

Read the whole article here.