Monarch Migration in Action
Monarch butterflies are moving through north and central Texas right now and I got to witness a tiny portion of the migration.
I don’t live on the main migration corridor for monarch butterflies. I do see them and they do visit my garden in early spring and late fall, but the bulk of the fall migration here traces the I-35 corridor through the central part of Texas, filtering the iconic orange and black butterflies south to their overwintering sites in central Mexico’s oyamel forests.
This weekend I got a taste of what that migration looks like and it left me wanting to see more of it.
Our first real cool front of the season hit Texas this week. After a sweltering summer that felt as if it would never end, I rejoiced with some friends in the DFW area as we camped out in an RV for a catch-up weekend together. October is one of my favorite months in Texas because we’re awash in goldenrod, bluestems, and Bidens aristosa. The air cools down at night but rises so that it’s pleasant during the day, and the sky is a deep blue that contrasts and coordinates with the yellowing of the tree leaves. It’s divine.
This weekend was that perfect October weekend. On Friday evening I noticed a couple of monarchs flitting through the campsites at the park we stayed at and then recalled it was the right time for them to be flying through. With the cool front, it was certainly an extra push to get to Mexico before an even colder front came to shut down the migration for the season.
I sat outside Saturday morning with my friends, drinking coffee, huddled in blankets, trying to stay warm by the propane fire ring my friend had set up. I watched as monarch after monarch came flying by, rising above the RV and passing on into the open grassy area beyond. After the first few I started paying closer attention to where they were coming from and noticed they were flying in from another open area on the other side of the road, adjacent to a woodland. One or two at a time, sometimes they stopped to sip nectar from the frogfruit blooming low in the grass. I thought about timing the butterflies as they came through, but decided against it because I was with my friends, it was chilly, and my coffee beckoned. However, I could estimate it was anywhere from every 30 seconds to two minutes that a new monarch would fly through, bopping up and down as it navigated the air currents we humans don’t notice, attempting to continue its southward journey.
Every single one I saw I said a silent “good luck” to, hoping it would make it to Mexico to join their relatives. I might have teared up a few times, thinking about what they were facing and had already faced, to do what is embedded in their DNA. With still so many miles ahead they have to make it past cars blazing down the highway, but also find enough nectar sources to fill up on energy to continue their migration. The drought this year was impactful in such a way that our fall bloom schedule is off a bit and likely not as abundant in certain regions. While there has been a decent amount of rain in recent weeks to stave off the worst of it for some, not everyone has seen the same amounts and technically we haven’t hit enough rainfall to pull some regions out of extreme or exceptional droughts.
While I did not see the masses of monarchs some people get to see on migration or see a tree covered in roosting monarchs, knowing that I was witnessing the steady beat of migrating monarchs was enough. These tiny events are happening all around us—heck, millions/billions of birds fly over us during migration season twice a year and most of us aren’t even aware of it. That’s why there’s been such a push in recent years to turn your lights out during critical migration seasons. But what smaller migrations or events are happening all around us that we are unaware of? How many people in North and Central Texas this weekend saw a monarch and understood that the butterfly was completing the cycle of the monarch migration for the year? Its great-great-great-great grandparents left Mexico in March and flew to Texas to start the cycle of migration up to southern Canada. And now it will finish that cycle, living the longest of any generation born this year, and overwintering in reproductive diapause in Mexico. And in March it will leave Mexico and start the cycle all over again.
Monarch butterflies made the news last year when the IUCN decided to list the monarch as endangered. Unfortunately, this caused a lot of confusion for the general public because the butterfly is not listed by the US Fish and Wildlife Service as endangered and was only recently labeled as a candidate species, and therefore has no protections under the (US) law. The monarch butterfly isn’t endangered, it is the migration that is threatened but there’s a lot of debate in the lepidopteran community about this migration threat, too. It’s a lot more nuanced than what most people are aware of and I think I’ll have to write more this subject in a future essay.
What matters is that we pay attention and remain in awe of the nature around us.
Misti writes regularly at Oceanic Wilderness and can be found on Instagram at @oceanicwilderness. She hosts two podcasts, Orange Blaze: A Florida Trail Podcast, and The Garden Path Podcast.
Loved this article. I remember back in the late 1990s, standing on the driveway at the park residence and looking up and seeing so many monarchs that the appeared to be leaves blowing in the wind. The same year we found a small tree in the Post Oak camp loop that was covered with roosting monarchs, there must have been THOUSANDS! I regret not getting pictures, they only stayed one night.
How fortunate we have been to witness that "steady beat" of monarch migration.