I was first introduced to the amazing life of the Monarch Butterfly back in 1991 when I was 11 years old. My Gifted & Talented teacher Sally Rollins had been in contact with the late Dr. Fred Urquhart about getting her students involved with tagging Monarchs here in Oklahoma. We spent so much time creating our own equipment, trying to find wild patches of milkweed, and looking for Monarch roosting grounds. We did finally find one and got to raise a female Monarch from a caterpillar, then release her with a tag supplied by Dr. Urquhart. Here is the old newspaper article: http://newsok.com/article/2375692
Fast forward 25 years. After being gone for a while on vacation, some honeyvine milkweed had grown up in my backyard, and by chance I noticed a hungry little monarch caterpillar. Normally all of this would have been mowed down, but as luck would have it, my vacation was long enough to allow it to take hold. Only a few days later, I noticed yet another caterpillar, and another… Remembering back how exciting Monarchs were when I was a child, I brought several in and put them in an empty aquarium and kept them fed with fresh milkweed. I was now the proud father of my own child (2 years at the time), and wanted to introduce him to the magic of the Monarch. Remembering the tagging I had done as a child, I started to search online to find out if this was something anyone still did. I had been out of touch with what was going on with Monarchs in the last 25 years. While I was happy to find out how easy and accessible tagging had become, I was sad to discover the condition of the migrating Monarch population. Needless to say, my neighbors were probably not happy with my lack of mowing that year and allowed the “weeds” to grow to raise Monarchs. We ended up tagging 25, though we raised about a total of 76.
Last year I unfortunately was in the process of getting my home ready to sell, and couldn’t leave the yard unmanaged. While I did allow several larger honeyvines to grow for the Monarchs, I couldn’t have the number of plants I had the year before and didn’t do any tagging.
We have now moved to a new home with a much larger yard, and this year I am working on creating a full blown pollinator habitat with ample amounts of milkweed. My whole family is excited about getting involved again and doing some more tagging this year.
