Butler County Conservation will host a monarch tagging event on Monday at Heery Woods Nature Center near Clarksville.
“It’ll be on the north side of Heery Woods, so you can come and go as you please,” Conservation Naturalist Annette Wittrock says. “Anyone can join us. We have nets available. Just park at the bike trail entrance and walk to the prairie. We’ll mark the path so you know where to go. And I’ll be in the prairie with the nets and tags and recording sheets and be ready to help you find those butterflies and tag them.”
The event is part of a program being administered by the University of Kansas that attaches tags to monarch butterflies to track their annual migration from the Midwest to mountainous regions of Mexico.
“This is part of the Monarch Watch program at the University of Kansas. The tags are small stickers. They’re about as big as the end of a pencil eraser. Each tag has a code on it and contact information from Monarch Watch. So we try to catch them during their migration and we have a recording sheet where we record whether they’re male or female, the date that we caught them and the location. And then we tag them and put that code with their information and release them to complete their journey. And then we give that all to the Monarch Watch program and they compile it all and they track what happens in the wintering grounds and their journey from here to there.”
Wittrock adds that monarchs are the only butterflies known to migrate such distances based on seasons.
The event will be from 4:00 to 7:00 p.m. and is open to the public.
