We Found a Tagged Monarch Butterfly Today!

We’re both pretty excited today because we found a tagged monarch butterfly with a guy’s help out on the Terry Trueblood Trail. We saw quite a few monarch butterflies around the flowers and saw a man spending a lot of time getting a video of one of them with his smartphone. Sena remarked about how nice all the flowers were and he pointed to the butterfly and said it was tagged.

We had no idea what he meant until after we filmed the butterfly and saw this tag with numbers and letters printed on its wing. Sena got a really good shot of it and we were able to read the code.

Then we discovered the website for tracking monarch butterflies.

You can actually report the tagged butterfly to MonarchWatch.Org.  We had never heard of the Monarch Watch Tagging Program, which got started in 1992 to track the monarch’s migration pattern.

We’re not certain of the sex of the monarch we saw today (which is part of the reporting process), but that’s OK. We can just enter “Unknown.” On the other hand, you can find instructions on line.  We plan to make a video of our walk tomorrow with the monarch as the star, but I wanted to give you a heads up about the most exciting part of it today.