Tagging Monarch Butterflies: BBEMA Conservation Efforts

Monarch butterflies embark on a marvelous migratory phenomenon.  In North America each autumn more than 250 million Monarchs leave the United States and Canada journeying south for up to 2,500 miles to their overwintering roosts in the mountain fir forests of west Mexico City.

The Monarch Watch Tagging Program is a large-scale community science project that was initiated in 1992 to help understand the dynamics of the monarch’s spectacular fall migration through mark and recapture.

BBEMA staff tagged their first Monarch fall migrant in 2013 and since then our organization has tagged and submitted tracking data for over 1000 Monarch butterflies.

 Yearly we begin tagging Monarchs on Aug 18th – with a concentrated effort to have all tagged butterflies released by September 20th – a good rule of thumb: when the wild asters, especially goldenrod are in bloom, the monarchs are migrating.  With the information from our tagging program we are better prepared to partner with local landowners and scientists to measure changes to our environment and promote conservation initiatives for Monarchs and local pollinators.

Monarch butterflies are known as ‘indicator species’ as they are easy to see and also not afraid of humans. They are considered today’s ‘canaries of the coal mines’.  Monarch numbers have been steadily declining – Populations of this once-common iconic black and orange butterfly have plummeted by approximately 90 percent in just the last two decades. The threats to the species are the loss of habitat in the United States–both the lack of availability of milkweed, the only host food plant for monarch caterpillars, as well as nectar plants needed by adults–through land conversion of habitat for agriculture, removal of native plants and the use of pesticides, and loss of habitat in Mexico from illegal logging around the monarchs’ overwintering habitat.