Fall means it’s time for the annual monarch butterfly migration for thousands of monarchs to pass through Kansas and the greater Midwest on their way to Mexico.
Master naturalists with the Johnson County K-State Research and Extension office celebrated the monarchs’ migration on a recent Saturday at the annual “Hasta Luego Monarchs” event at Olathe’s Pollinator Prairie.
The free event, which was on Sept. 28, featured exhibits, demonstrations, arts, crafts, games and native plants highlighting the monarch and other pollinator animals, insects and plants.
Monarch Watch, based at the University of Kansas and dedicated to researching and conserving monarch butterflies, say the butterflies travel thousands of miles on an annual roundtrip journey that takes four generations to complete.
Volunteers at the “Hasta Luego” event demonstrated how to catch a monarch with a net using the “correct” flip technique and how to correctly tag a monarch butterfly on the “mitten” part of their wing for identification before releasing them onto a flower.
Volunteers said researchers in Johnson County and the rest of Kansas play a “key role” in tracking and learning more about the butterflies.
Catching and tagging monarchs
Ann Patrick and Esther Kong, volunteers with Monarch Watch, showcased milkweed plants, monarch caterpillars, as well as monarchs through their entire chrysalis process and their final stage as fully-developed butterflies ready for tagging and release.
Patrick said the migration this year came a little later than usual, but the direction from which the wind was blowing that Saturday morning was a “good thing.”
Patrick said in order to catch a monarch, a person should pretend to be a praying mantis.
“You want to go up to a butterfly, and you want to be slow,” she said. “So, they are going to see the fast movements, but they are not going to see the slow movements. So, like a praying mantis, you go up slow, and at the last second when it is on the plant, you are going to whip it (the net) really quick.”
Patrick said using your thumb and forefinger you can gently get the monarch butterfly out of the net.
“And holding the butterfly is really important,” she said. “You are keeping all four wings together, and you are holding them either at their thorax [the middle part of the body between the wings] or the leading edge of the wing.”
Patrick said data written down for tracking includes date, location, sex and a tag code of four letters and three numbers.
The plan is for the butterflies to be recaptured as part of the tracking process.
“But you can’t call and say, where is my butterfly now,” she said. “It doesn’t have a radio chip in it. This is community science.”
Patrick said Monarch Watch has a new app that allows the sheet of tags downloaded onto a phone.
Other species
There was information about other species at the “Hasta Luego” event, including about moths, bees and bats.
Master Naturalist Nancy Chapman said people learned to fear bats from the movies, but bats have no interest in people and are insectivores.
“They protect the food we eat like apples and corn,” she said. “If you don’t want a worm in your apple thank a bat.”
Chapman said bats also protect almonds, chocolate and coconuts and further south bats help pollinate cacti and agave plants.
Chapman said bats have as many bones as a person, but the difference is their hips go sideways versus forward allowing them to stretch their membranes to fly.
“Bats can’t jump,” she said. “It has to get two to three feet off the ground (at least), so it can drop into flight.”
Invasive plants
Calla Lily pear trees, commonly known as Bradford pears, and honeysuckle plants are the most invasive species thriving in Kansas.
Master Naturalist Stan Runnels said the pear tree seeds distribute “so readily” and overtake an area.
“They don’t really contribute anything of great value,” he said. “When they take over a spot, they really shade everything else.”
Runnels said honeysuckle are non-native plants.
“The honeysuckle, when it takes over, nothing will grow underneath it,” he said.
Runnels said bulletins go out regularly inviting the community to join in invasive plant clean-ups throughout the county.
Some Johnson County cities, including Lenexa and Roeland Park, have also enlisted the help of goat herds to much away at invasive plants.
Another invasive species is garlic mustard, a plant indigenous to Europe, that overtakes streambeds.
“We have to bag it, and we can’t compost it,” Runnels said.
He added that along with the garlic mustard plant, the garlic mustard aphid — a type of insect — has also arrived since 2022 and started to overtake parts of Kansas.
“We don’t know how it got here,’ he said. “It is a pest.”
The pollinator prairie at 320 S. Blake St., in Olathe was for nearly 40 years a site where corporations and government agencies collected used and surplus chemicals for recycling. Some of that chemical waste leaked into the soil and groundwater.
In 1994 the site was declared a Superfund Site, and the clean-up was directed through the federal Environmental Protection Agency.
The site has now been established as an ecological habitat with the help of Johnson County, Monarch Watch and Pollinator Partnership.
The site hosts 400 native plants per garden in four areas with a Monarch Way Station to create an environment for native bees, butterflies, moths, birds and other pollinators.
The Johnson County K-State Research and Extension Master Naturalists maintain the gardens weekly.
This story was originally published by the Johnson County Post.
