On a Butterfly’s Wing

A little white sticker on the ground might not seem like an exciting find, but when journalist Jaimie Maussan found the 14-year-old tag on the floor of a Mexican forest, he quickly realized he held something amazing. The sticker had once adorned the wing of a migrating monarch butterfly, stuck there in 2001 by a volunteer in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. 

“It tells the story of a sunny October day in 2001, a little butterfly that made it to Mexico, and a storm that killed a lot of monarchs,” says Wanda DeWaard, outdoor educator at the park and leader of its Great Smoky Mountains Monarch Watch Project, about the tag. 

A longtime fan of the monarch’s beauty and complexity, DeWaard has spearheaded the park’s Monarch Watch efforts since 1997. Over the years, she and monarch-loving volunteers have tagged as few as eight and as many as 300 butterflies as they pass through en route to their wintering grounds in Mexico. The tags, placed on the butterfly’s lower wing, have codes that connect to information about when and where it was applied. 

“The tagging can give us a lot of information about how the butterflies accomplish their travel and how fast they do it,” DeWaard says. That information has become increasingly     important in recent years, because monarch butterflies are in trouble, as DeWaard has seen firsthand through the Smokies’ tagging project. “Their numbers are way down,” she says.

A lot of the population decrease has to do with habitat destruction. Monarch butterflies rely on milkweed, a plant that supplies monarch caterpillars’ only food source. But milkweed populations are decreasing, a phenomenon largely blamed on agricultural practices that use “Roundup-ready” crops. These plants are engineered to be immune to the herbicide, so the fields can be sprayed indiscriminately without harming the crop. Milkweed is often a casualty. Other factors, such as increased development in open spaces where milkweed grows, have also played a part. 

Monarch enthusiasts like DeWaard hope that by involving more people in the effort to understand this remarkable insect, those trends might reverse, or at least slow down. “It’s America’s most famous butterfly—it’s iconic,” she says.

Monarch tagging in the park will take place during September and October, with dates to be announced. Check www.gsmit.org/CSMonarchTagging.html or contact tiffany@gsmit.org to sign up.