My participation in the Dr. Fred Urquhart research program to locate the over-wintering destination of the Monarch buttery was a brief blip in the life of a young boy growing up in the rolling hills and dairy farms of northwest Wisconsin in the early 1970s.
There was a patch of land on the 5 acres my parents owned next to Little Butternut Lake that was ripe with milkweed plants. I would walk the area with my dog, Ralph, and see fat, black-striped caterpillars slowly munching away on the leaves of the milkweed.
In 1970, when I was 9 years old, I joined the Little Butternut 4-H Club and selected the ‘Nature Conservation’ project. Throughout the year I studied nature, collect samples, took notes and pictures, then put together a booklet to enter into the Polk County fair. That included a diagram of the life cycle of the Monarch butterfly and a write up on my experience with raising and tagging them.
My mom had heard about a request from Dr. Urquhart for volunteers to tag Monarchs in order to help determine where they migrated every fall. Since I was very young, mom was the go-between the University of Toronto and me. She would mail them a check to cover the fee to defray material costs. She would pass along the butterfly tags, report forms and newsletters to me.
I created a butterfly net out of cheesecloth, a coat hanger and wooden dowel. After catching a Monarch, I would handle it gently in order to attach the tag over the top of one of its wings. I would record the tag number, date and sex of the butterfly. At the end of the year, my mom mailed the activity log back to Dr. Urquhart.
I continued to tag Monarchs in 1971. Except this year, I raised a few from caterpillars. I built a wooden box with screen sides and put a few caterpillars inside with plenty of milkweed leaves. After they built their chrysalis, I would guess at the day they would emerge. One time I got lucky. Just 10 minutes after my mom and I went to look in the wooden box, a Monarch broke out of its cocoon and began to dry its wings!
Over the two years as a ‘research associate’, I do not know the exact number of Monarchs I tagged. My guess is about three dozen. I never received notification that one of my tagged butterflies was ever found somewhere else in the world. But I do not consider my efforts as a waste of time. I learned to respect nature and what we can learn from it.
In 1975, just a few years after I lost interest in tagging, the cumulative effort of all the Urquhart butterfly research associates provided enough data to help determine the Monarch wintering grounds. You could say my efforts were even mentioned in an article summarizing Dr. Urquhart’s research on Monarch butterflies: “…After forty years of determination in mobilizing thousands of professionals and amateurs in a massive volunteer tagging program, they located the over-wintering sites of the monarch butterfly in a remote area of Mexico …”
That discovery did not mean tagging no longer needed to be done. With technical advances over the decades, better tagging techniques and light-weight materials had been developed that continued to help researchers and scientists better understand why nature does the things it does.
Going through a foot locker full of memorabilia, I came across newsletters, log sheets and unused tags from back in those days. A quick search on the internet for ‘Monarch Migration’ found a large list of videos and articles that brought back memories from those days in Wisconsin – over 45 years ago.