Michael Donegan thought he had caught a monarch, but the butterfly was actually a tiger swallowtail.
It was just practice for his capture later, anyway.
Instead of catching monarch butterflies with their nets for tagging purposes, about a dozen participants Saturday morning at Burr Oak Woods Conservation Area in Blue Springs reached out for any species of butterfly, capturing more than 10 different species in an hour’s time. At 10 a.m. following an evening of relatively chilly weather – and in early September – it seemed no monarchs were available.
Attendees saw about a handful of monarchs along the trail throughout the hour, but Donegan would prove successful in capturing the lone monarch along one of the nature trails – not bad for the Lee’s Summit resident who attended the event at the request of his girlfriend, botanist and journalist Paula Winchester.
“I owe it all to Paula,” Donegan says. “Behind every great man, there is a great woman – mine is Paula. I’m an attorney by day, but I moonlight as a nature lover.
“How much did this cost you, Paula?” Donegan questioned, jokingly. “And it didn’t seemed staged at all.”
Monarch Watch, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the education, conservation and research of monarch butterflies, is based at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. According to Phillip Brinkley, a Burr Oak Woods naturalist, monarch butterflies are a species in decline, so KU researchers set up a method of tagging and tracking the monarchs to monitor their migration.
The tagging process, Brinkley said, is completely dependent upon volunteers at events like Saturday’s. Similar tagging events are open to the public starting at 10 a.m. Sept. 11 and 18 at Burr Oak Woods, 1401 N.W. Park Road in Blue Springs.
Because of the cool weather Friday evening, Brinkley says, the monarchs were lethargic – though unharmed – Saturday morning, flying high and quickly to stimulate their metabolism.
“I can’t say I was expecting more – I was hoping for more,” Brinkley says of the scarcity of visible monarchs on Saturday morning. “We know they’re there. I’d say the numbers we saw were expected.”
A harsh winter in Mexico in 2009, Brinkley says, also has affected the number of monarchs that migrated back to the United States. The monarchs that participants aimed to capture Saturday morning were likely days to several weeks old in their adult lives, Brinkley says. They are attracted to swamp and common milkweed types found in the restored prairie at Burr Oak Woods, he says, and the adult monarchs drink the nectar of flowers.
