Several of my family members and I have planted pollinator gardens in the hopes that we can provide fuel stations for all the migrating insects and birds. Since we are kinda scattered from hell to breakfast we ended up with small to large spaces available scattered across several states including Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. It is great to see these migration paths tracked in this article.
That confirms that we are in good locations along normal flyways. My own property includes lots of antelope-horn milkweed and a couple other milkweeds. I found monarch caterpillars in my garden last week. With the recent rains breaking the summer drought I have so much in bloom again - asters, sunflowers, milkweed, numerous grasses, coreopsis, native onions, salvia, sage, dalea, etc. My place is humming with bees and wasps and the birds cast their tunes upon the winds.
For the first time since we moved here more than 25 years ago I had a meadowlark on my place and I was able to grab photos. It's a common bird where I grew up but though their range extends to this part of Texas, I had never seen one until late last week. Along with all the other birds passing through, that meadowlark was like encountering an old friend. I recognized the call and walked the place until I found the bird. As a kid I used to walk the pastures imitating the meadowlark calls, trying to sow confusion amongst their ranks, or maybe to let them know I might be one of the good guys. Who really knows?
I normally go outside every morning to identify birds using Merlin. For a couple weeks now, as I sit and listen to the world going by, monarchs and other butterflies have been migrating past. They are generally flying above treetop level hugging the treetops and terrain. As I drove north yesterday on a nice two hour trip there was a steady stream of butterflies. Most were traveling a few feet higher than an automobile as they crossed the road though some were skimming the ground and undoubtedly tempting fate. Makes me wonder how many have tags or stickers and of those, how many are scattered in pieces along the highway after dipping a bit too low to the ground.
Thanks for this article. I'm passing this around so that others can see where they are positioned on the flyway.
The wife planted one this year. (Registered, got a little placard to place on a stake.)
We saw a dozen or so cocoons appear around her garden—on plants, on the trim of our house. And then we saw them empty out. The skies too around the neighborhood were frequented by monarchs last month—we'd see them all the time.
Funny how you start to notice a thing (that had always been there to some degree or another) once you start to invest some time and interest in it.
Hello Omaha! The gently rolling landscape in that region must be a lot like a kiddie rollercoaster for bugs like this that ride the winds just above the treetops.
Your wife started a lot like several of my relatives, by planting a pollinator garden and registering it. I think projects like that give people a reason to engage in outdoor activities and to break the connection to the living room couch or the gamer chair. This is something that all ages can really get involved with and learn from.
I have seen so many photo updates of caterpillars metamorphosing and finally launching. It is pretty awesome to see how a fat, tubular bug stuffed with plant material can dissolve into a bug soup and once the components settle out it will have added wings to a much improved tubular frame and only needs a few minutes to figure out how to turn those flappers into forward motion.
I agree that this becomes a real eye-opening exercise once you discover this in your own garden. There are so many things that I have been able to enjoy since beginning to reclaim my place by eliminating all the non-native plants that were introduced by previous owners. I still have a long way to go with a couple of the more invasive species of grass but I know that I will get there. I have a rototiller and Amazon, Fedex, and UPS bring new cardboard for weed block on a schedule that is disturbingly regular. Every new season brings another species that I haven't seen earlier into camera range. I'm feeling like the bugs and other animals see me as a normal part of the landscape that offers no threat to them now. That's the best feeling. Just like them, I belong there.
Thank you for reading all that. I'm hoping to hear from several that they have installed the app so that we can participate in trying to track some of these monarchs. There are so few tagged that it would be really cool to have one butterfly show up on multiple family members' properties. There might be a cool family challenge in this somewhere with prizes handed out at annual reunions.
It's really hard to describe how exciting it was to hear that meadowlark out on land that I have been restoring as native prairie. When something like that bird appears after being here for more than 25 years without seeing a single one it feels like validation of my efforts. To paraphrase a movie - "If you unbuild it they will come". I've been unbuilding things across the landscape to make this place more attractive to all the things that should be here. It's pretty great.
I’m on the monarch migration path and had wild milkweeds with monarch butterflies for a few years but the last 2-3 years oleander aphids exploded in population and I’ve seen a single caterpillar since.
Are there ways to mitigate that while not killing the monarchs or am I just shit out of luck?
The ones available online are from the western U.S.; depending on where you live, that may be counterproductive to the locally native species that are struggling.
Grow some yarrow, dill, or sunflowers and get ladybugs to lay their eggs all over your garden naturally, and I imagine you'll start to see much better results! Larval stage ladybugs are significantly more ravenous than their adult forms.
No problem! I'm happy it got some attention since it a neat mix of tech stuff and other scientific disciplines. Thank dang too since the second chance pool saved it from discoverability limbo.
The article made it seem that the tags way on the order of half a gram, but that would be about the butterfly's weight. Even at 60 mg it's a significant additional burden for the butterfly, I'd expect. Even if you only take the heaviest Monarch butterflies that weigh in about 600 mg, it is 10% of their body weight. Like an 6 kg backpack for a human weighing 60 kg.
Yeah, that is exactly what I thought as well. Still, I think drawing a comparison to human beings might be a miss here, as I feel like it's just a completely different set of mechanics.
Bet they are still pissed with the extra workout though haha
Monarchs never really stop impressing. The journey they make cross-generational I think is just one of those marvels of nature that never fails to blow my mind.
Has anyone gone down to their nesting location in Mexico? It's on my bucket list but I hear that as their numbers dwindle, it's a harder thing to experience.
Several of my family members and I have planted pollinator gardens in the hopes that we can provide fuel stations for all the migrating insects and birds. Since we are kinda scattered from hell to breakfast we ended up with small to large spaces available scattered across several states including Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. It is great to see these migration paths tracked in this article.
That confirms that we are in good locations along normal flyways. My own property includes lots of antelope-horn milkweed and a couple other milkweeds. I found monarch caterpillars in my garden last week. With the recent rains breaking the summer drought I have so much in bloom again - asters, sunflowers, milkweed, numerous grasses, coreopsis, native onions, salvia, sage, dalea, etc. My place is humming with bees and wasps and the birds cast their tunes upon the winds.
For the first time since we moved here more than 25 years ago I had a meadowlark on my place and I was able to grab photos. It's a common bird where I grew up but though their range extends to this part of Texas, I had never seen one until late last week. Along with all the other birds passing through, that meadowlark was like encountering an old friend. I recognized the call and walked the place until I found the bird. As a kid I used to walk the pastures imitating the meadowlark calls, trying to sow confusion amongst their ranks, or maybe to let them know I might be one of the good guys. Who really knows?
I normally go outside every morning to identify birds using Merlin. For a couple weeks now, as I sit and listen to the world going by, monarchs and other butterflies have been migrating past. They are generally flying above treetop level hugging the treetops and terrain. As I drove north yesterday on a nice two hour trip there was a steady stream of butterflies. Most were traveling a few feet higher than an automobile as they crossed the road though some were skimming the ground and undoubtedly tempting fate. Makes me wonder how many have tags or stickers and of those, how many are scattered in pieces along the highway after dipping a bit too low to the ground.
Thanks for this article. I'm passing this around so that others can see where they are positioned on the flyway.
An Omaha, Nebraska monarch-stop reporting in.
The wife planted one this year. (Registered, got a little placard to place on a stake.)
We saw a dozen or so cocoons appear around her garden—on plants, on the trim of our house. And then we saw them empty out. The skies too around the neighborhood were frequented by monarchs last month—we'd see them all the time.
Funny how you start to notice a thing (that had always been there to some degree or another) once you start to invest some time and interest in it.
Hello Omaha! The gently rolling landscape in that region must be a lot like a kiddie rollercoaster for bugs like this that ride the winds just above the treetops.
Your wife started a lot like several of my relatives, by planting a pollinator garden and registering it. I think projects like that give people a reason to engage in outdoor activities and to break the connection to the living room couch or the gamer chair. This is something that all ages can really get involved with and learn from.
I have seen so many photo updates of caterpillars metamorphosing and finally launching. It is pretty awesome to see how a fat, tubular bug stuffed with plant material can dissolve into a bug soup and once the components settle out it will have added wings to a much improved tubular frame and only needs a few minutes to figure out how to turn those flappers into forward motion.
I agree that this becomes a real eye-opening exercise once you discover this in your own garden. There are so many things that I have been able to enjoy since beginning to reclaim my place by eliminating all the non-native plants that were introduced by previous owners. I still have a long way to go with a couple of the more invasive species of grass but I know that I will get there. I have a rototiller and Amazon, Fedex, and UPS bring new cardboard for weed block on a schedule that is disturbingly regular. Every new season brings another species that I haven't seen earlier into camera range. I'm feeling like the bugs and other animals see me as a normal part of the landscape that offers no threat to them now. That's the best feeling. Just like them, I belong there.
I love that your family has basically created a distributed network of little rest stops across several states. And the meadowlark story is wonderful
Thank you for reading all that. I'm hoping to hear from several that they have installed the app so that we can participate in trying to track some of these monarchs. There are so few tagged that it would be really cool to have one butterfly show up on multiple family members' properties. There might be a cool family challenge in this somewhere with prizes handed out at annual reunions.
It's really hard to describe how exciting it was to hear that meadowlark out on land that I have been restoring as native prairie. When something like that bird appears after being here for more than 25 years without seeing a single one it feels like validation of my efforts. To paraphrase a movie - "If you unbuild it they will come". I've been unbuilding things across the landscape to make this place more attractive to all the things that should be here. It's pretty great.
A lot comes up when you search for the BluMorpho tags. Some random links:
https://celltracktech.com/pages/blumorpho
https://monarchresearch.org/news-and-events/monarch-research...
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/track-monarch-b...
https://www.opb.org/article/2026/09/21/pacific-northwest-mon...
A little pdf guide: https://westernmonarchcount.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/M...
Looks like there is an app you can download too that can do stuff like scanning for tags nearby.
An app for tracking monarchs with these tags is here for iOS [1].
[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/project-monarch-science/id6460...
Thank you - the tracker they use weighs in at 60 milligrams, incredibly light.
I've moved some of those links to the toptext. Thanks!
The site looks like it got hugged to death.
I’m on the monarch migration path and had wild milkweeds with monarch butterflies for a few years but the last 2-3 years oleander aphids exploded in population and I’ve seen a single caterpillar since.
Are there ways to mitigate that while not killing the monarchs or am I just shit out of luck?
I release ladybugs every year and that seems to help. You can buy them online if they are hard to find locally.
The ones available online are from the western U.S.; depending on where you live, that may be counterproductive to the locally native species that are struggling.
Grow some yarrow, dill, or sunflowers and get ladybugs to lay their eggs all over your garden naturally, and I imagine you'll start to see much better results! Larval stage ladybugs are significantly more ravenous than their adult forms.
I've replaced the top link with a different URL that's currently responding, and moved the submitted URL (https://blog.cwf-fcf.org/index.php/en/tiny-tracking-tags-for...) to the toptext. Thanks!
What happens when a bird or predator eats the Monarch? Are these tags safe for animal consumption?
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It’s amazing that they can cross Lake Michigan without stopping. It looks like 60-70 miles. What a cool project.
Wild stuff, thank you! I've got quite a few monarch fans to send this to now...
No problem! I'm happy it got some attention since it a neat mix of tech stuff and other scientific disciplines. Thank dang too since the second chance pool saved it from discoverability limbo.
The ability of this tiny device to transmit Bluetooth in a 100 meter radius is wild!
The article made it seem that the tags way on the order of half a gram, but that would be about the butterfly's weight. Even at 60 mg it's a significant additional burden for the butterfly, I'd expect. Even if you only take the heaviest Monarch butterflies that weigh in about 600 mg, it is 10% of their body weight. Like an 6 kg backpack for a human weighing 60 kg.
Yeah, that is exactly what I thought as well. Still, I think drawing a comparison to human beings might be a miss here, as I feel like it's just a completely different set of mechanics.
Bet they are still pissed with the extra workout though haha
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Is there any chance that the plague of Flock sensors could be used to help track the radio tags?
Monarchs never really stop impressing. The journey they make cross-generational I think is just one of those marvels of nature that never fails to blow my mind.
Has anyone gone down to their nesting location in Mexico? It's on my bucket list but I hear that as their numbers dwindle, it's a harder thing to experience.
What gets me is that the butterflies arriving in Mexico have never been there before, yet somehow they find the same overwintering sites
Very interesting!! HN never disappoints!
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