The fifth annual Monarch Butterfly and Pollinator Festival moves online this October this year with programming designed to honor the memories of family, friends and loved ones lost to COVID-19 and social injustice in 2020.
“We’re stressing the spiritual aspect of the monarch migration this year,” said Festival founder Monika Maeckle of the Texas Butterfly Ranch. “We’ve seen too many headlines this year, with too little time to reflect, to mourn and to celebrate.”
Each fall tens of millions of monarch butterflies move through San Antonio and the Texas Funnel on their way to their overwintering sites in Mexico. Photo by Monika Maeckle
The Festival will unfold October 1 – 29 during peak monarch migration season with virtual workshops, teacher training, the delivery of “caterpillar condos” to Title 1 schools, the construction of a Dia de la Memoria/Day of Remembrance altar at Confluence Park in San Antonio, and the release of monarch butterflies tagged in the names of those lost during this unique and challenging year. Festival organizers will also produce a video that will capture the events of 2020, with the resilience of the monarch butterfly as inspiration.
See the full schedule of events here.
Festival organizers are seeking help from the community to assemble a complete list of the names of those in San Antonio and Bexar County who passed due to COVID-19 or at the hands of social injustice. If you have a friend, family member or other loved one you’d like to honor, please fill out this form.
Millions of monarch butterflies move through the Texas Funnel each fall on their way to the high altitude mountains of Mexico. They typically arrive in time for Day of the Dead, which this year falls on November 1. Indigenous peoples believed that these butterflies represented their fallen ancestors coming home for an annual visit.
We’ll release a butterfly in their name.
In its previous incarnations over the past four years, the Festival has consummated in a gathering of thousands at the Pearl, a midtown mixed use development along the San Antonio River. Families learned about pollinators and the ecosystems that sustain them as trained docents circulated through the crowd conducting one-on-one butterfly tagging demonstrations.
The docents explained the migration to participants, then adhered tiny stickers to the discal cell of the butterflies’ wings as part of a citizen scientist exercise organized by Monarch Watch at the University of Kansas at Lawrence. Typically, taggers record the date, sex, location of the butterfly tagged, as well as the name of the person who tagged it.
Indigenous peoples viewed the return of monarch butterflies to Mexico each fall as their ancestors coming home to visit. Courtesy photo
Indigenous peoples viewed the return of monarch butterflies to Mexico each fall as their ancestors coming home to visit. Courtesy photo
We’ll release a butterfly in their name.
In its previous incarnations over the past four years, the Festival has consummated in a gathering of thousands at the Pearl, a midtown mixed use development along the San Antonio River. Families learned about pollinators and the ecosystems that sustain them as trained docents circulated through the crowd conducting one-on-one butterfly tagging demonstrations.
The docents explained the migration to participants, then adhered tiny stickers to the discal cell of the butterflies’ wings as part of a citizen scientist exercise organized by Monarch Watch at the University of Kansas at Lawrence. Typically, taggers record the date, sex, location of the butterfly tagged, as well as the name of the person who tagged it.
“For obvious reasons, one-on-one tagging demos can’t happen this year,” said Maeckle, “but the education will continue.”
Butterflies will be tagged and released at various locations around San Antonio in the name of a person who passed, rather than the person who tagged it, she explained. The names and data collected will be sent to Monarch Watch, which pays pays $5 per tagged butterfly found and reported in the Mexican mountains. Recoveries are announced each spring.
A video of the tagging and other events will be released on October 29 in honor of those who passed. All events will be FREE.
Tens of thousands of monarch butterflies are tagged by citizen scientists each fall. Photo by Monika Maeckle
“We’ll release the butterflies this fall with the hope they make it to Mexico, reproduce, lay eggs that hatch into caterpillars, transform into chrysalises, and morph into adults that will continue the life cycle,” said Maeckle.
In the Festival’s four years, eight monarch butterflies tagged and released at the event have been recovered and reported.
The Festival began in 2016 as a public private partnership and response to San Antonio’s status as the nation’s first Monarch Butterfly Champion City, so named by the National Wildlife Federation. It is made possible through collaborations with private companies, public entities and nonprofit organizations.
2020 Festival sponsors include the John and Florence Newman Foundation, The Winkler Family Foundation, The San Antonio River Authority, Valero Energy Corporation, HEB, The San Antonio River Foundation, The World Heritage Office, and San Antonio Water Services (SAWS), with the San Antonio Report as a media sponsor.
The mission of the Monarch Butterfly and Pollinator Festival is to educate the community about the importance of the insect pollinators that make one out of every three bites of our food possible, enlighten people on the ecosystems that sustain them (and us), and underscore our inherent connectedness to each other, especially Mexico.
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Wonderful, I will love to learn how to provide food for them.