Family Friday: Tagging Monarchs

Autumn is my favorite season. The weather finally begins to cool, which in Texas means the highs drop into the 90s, and monarch butterflies begin to reappear. They can use your help again this time of year, just as they could during their spring migration. Lucas Miller explains what you and your family can do to both enjoy and nurture nature by assisting in research efforts to track monarch butterflies. Enjoy!

Back in the spring, I wrote a bit about planting milkweeds to attract monarchs.  The females seek out milkweeds when it’s time to lay their eggs and, hopefully, you had fun watching the little caterpillars feasting, fattening, and metamorphosing while you sipped your morning coffee on the porch.

Monarchs are on the move again so give those milkweeds some TLC (or maybe just go out and buy some more) if yours, like mine, have been decimated by aphids, scale insects, potato beetles, and a series of others.  The toxins in milkweeds are supposed to offer protection but, in my garden, the milkweeds suffer far more infestations than any of our other plants.

Mid- to late-August marks the very beginning of the monarchs’ migrations south—those east of the Rocky Mountains head to the forested mountains in south central Mexico and those west head to coastal southern California. It’s truly an amazing feat with some monarchs starting as far away as eastern Canada and voyaging nearly 3,000 miles. If you’d like to know more, JourneyNorth.org is a superb website about migration. Click here to see their extensive information about monarchs.

Another group, MonarchWatch, coordinates a huge effort to tag monarch butterflies and your family can get involved.  Based at the University of Kansas, MonarchWatch, provides some basic information about monarch life cycles as well as kits you can order to get your family involved in actual scientific research.

Tagging amounts to catching a butterfly and placing a small, numbered sticker on the butterfly’s hind wing. No, it doesn’t make the butterfly go in circles or affect their flight in any way. You keep a log of the tag numbers, the dates, locations, and genders of your butterflies (it’s easy to tell the difference) and, just as importantly, send it in to the scientists. Apparently a lot of folks go to the effort to tag them and fill out their logs but then don’t send them in.

If you purchase a tagging kit, starting at $15, it will come with instructions telling you how to handle the butterfly safely (they’re tougher than you might think) and exactly how to place the tags so that you don’t harm the butterfly. This is definitely something that young children can do—4 year-olds are known to participate. As a matter of fact, they say that your child’s little fingers may better suited to the task than your big ones. Something like 2,000 schools and 100,000 children participate in this effort every year but the more the merrier. Out of the many butterflies tagged, less than .1% will be recovered!

The hard part turns out to be catching the tiny nomads in the first place but, again, MonarchWatch provides techniques to catch butterflies and a shop to buy a net. If you’re a crafty/thrifty type, they even have free plans so you can build your own.

Time is of the essence, however, as monarchs are already on the move. So get out there and be a “citizen scientist!” It will get you outdoors and that, in and of itself, makes it worth the effort. You will also be getting your kids involved in genuine scientific research and demystifying that often intimidating realm.  See you out there!

Note:  I will be at Balcones Canyonlands National Wildlife Refuge on October 10 to perform and help participants tag monarch butterflies.

Readers will be excited to hear that Lucas recently released his first DVD, “Animals Rock with Lucas Miller.” We’ve been checking it out over the past couple of weeks and love, love, love it. As you know, we are big fans of his songs but songs alone do not a good DVD make. “Animals Rock with Lucas Miller” also has clever visuals and animations so it is as fun to watch as it is to listen to, even on multiple repeats. If you aren’t currently located in Texas, you can also get a taste of Lucas’ presentations and see why families love them so much. And, much to the girls’ delight, the DVD comes in a plastic-free case made from recycled materials. The DVD can be ordered online. Below is one of the DVD selections, which features the monarch, so you can see for yourself how fabulous the DVD is.

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