Hard to believe it’s been a decade since we staged the first Monarch Butterfly and Pollinator Festival at the Pearl in October 2016.

As founder and director of the Festival for its first seven years, I recall dragging a green gardening wagon loaded with several laundry hampers stocked with tagged monarch butterflies into the yard outside the Pearl Stable. There, following an audience-led countdown, “Three…Two…One,” we opened the hampers and the butterflies flew toward the skies, delighting all in the crowd. A handful of docents did one-on-one tagging demonstrations with kids and families and a  “Pollinator Posse” of young cyclists led the People for Pollinators Parade through the Pearl’s footprint. By the end of the day, thousands had experienced the magic of monarch butterflies.

That ad hoc community collaboration kicked off a decade of pollinator advocacy and celebrated San Antonio’s status as the National Wildlife Federation’s first Monarch Champion city.

Since, the campaign that targeted 50 mayors has recruited more than 2,300 cities to take that pledge. Currently 353 cities are enrolled in the NWF program–but only eight rank as Monarch Champions like San Antonio.

A child holds a male monarch butterfly at the first Monarch Butterfly and Pollinator Festival, October 2016. –Photo by Scott Ball

The Festival came about because in 2015 President Barack Obama issued a presidential memorandum announcing the nation’s first ever National Pollinator Strategy. The NWF responded to the memo with the Mayor’s Monarch Pledge, which laid out 24 action items aimed at increasing pollinator habitat for cities along the Interstate 35 highway corridor, a migratory flyway for monarch butterflies and other wildlife. To participate in the Pledge, a city had to commit to act on three of the items; to join the “leadership circle” it had to embrace eight.

San Antonio rose to the occasion and committed to act on all 24 action items, a feat that sent the NWF back to their conference rooms to come up with an appropriate term for such a commitment. Those of us advocating for San Antonio–me, Grace Barnett who worked for NWF at the time, and biologist Terri Matiella, now a biology professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio–suggested “Monarch Capitol.” NWF wisely pointed out that perhaps other cities might also rise to the challenge. How about Monarch Champion? And so it was decided.

Standing before a group of pollinator enthusiasts at City Hall and wearing stylish Monarch butterfly wing earrings on December 9, 2015,  Ivy Taylor, San Antonio mayor at the time, shared the proclamation that committed our city to adopt all of the Pledge’s 24 recommended actions.

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Upon closely reviewing the requirements–18 of which had already been executed by the San Antonio River Authority’s massive Mission Reach riparian restoration–I realized that San Antonio had committed to execute a pollinator festival.

A few weeks later, I mentioned the need to stage such an event to my friend Ramiro Cavazos, then President of the San Antonio Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. Cavazos’ office was housed at the Pearl, a former brewery converted into an award winning mixed-use development on the San Antonio River. He responded, “Let’s do it!”

We approached Elizabeth Fauerso, the Pearl’s Chief Operating Officer. She loved the idea and offered full support. Why not add a climate change panel while we’re at it, she suggested. 

Suddenly, in addition to my fulltime job and recent caretaking duties of my aging mom, I found myself the volunteer founder/director of San Antonio’s first Monarch Butterfly and Pollinator Festival. By the time of its staging, the three-day event would include a climate change panel discussion, an art show of Mexican haute couture using monarch butterflies as its muse, a People for Pollinators Parade, massive butterfly release and monarch butterfly tagging demos. All this unfolded during peak monarch migration season in San Antonio.

  • Mayor Ivy Taylor's Monarch butterfly wing bling
    Mayor Ivy Taylor sports monarch butterfly earrings when announcing San Antonio's signing of the NWF's Mayor's Monarch Pledge in December 2015.

Ten years later, the Pledge and the Festival have morphed to new stages, taking on lives of their own.

According to Patrick Fitzgerald of the NWF who came up with the idea of the Mayor’s Monarch Pledge, cities taking the Pledge these days must now re-up every year and are held to account with regular check-ins. In addition, NWF has added six more possible actions for a total of 30, but a Champion city need only act on 24.

Other changes to the Pledge include timely parameters in which to execute the action items. Fitzgerald said these changes evolved in response to changing leadership. He categorized San Antonio as “exceptional” in keeping its commitment to pollinator advocacy. “We talk about San Antonio all the time,” he said in a recent phone call.

The Festival, too, has evolved. In the early years, we staged a massive spectacle of releasing several hundred butterflies, which made for a great photograph and 10 seconds of enchantment from the crowd. But we determined this was overly indulgent, not worth the expense nor the trauma to the butterflies, nor did it serve any conservation purpose beyond spectacle. I was concerned that people would be gravely disappointed the first year we canceled the butterfly release; only one person commented on its absence.

After four years at the Pearl, we had planned to celebrate our fifth anniversary with a rock star cast and programming, but  COVID lockdown and safety concerns nixed our plans.

Like the monarch, we had to pivot and flit to meet the moment: we staged a virtual Festival.

It included the making of a movie, 2020: A Metamorphosis, as well as Zoom appearances by Batman of Mexico Rodrigo Medellin and best selling nature writer Doug Tallamy. The pandemic also led us to introduce a spiritual dimension to our line-up, the Forever Journey campaign. Inspired by the beliefs of many that monarch butterflies embody the souls of the dead, the initiative highlights the monarchs’ return “home” to the Mexican mountains, a place they’ve never been yet they magically find each year in early November right around Day of the Dead.

Butterfly release in 2017 at the Pearl. We stopped doing this because it served no purpose beyond spectacle. Photo by Matt Buikema

We all recall those dark times of lockdown and death, when refrigerated vehicles held the bodies of those who passed and survivors endured the impossible notion that we could not gather in person to celebrate those no longer with us. In response, the Forever Journey campaign tagged each butterfly in honor of someone who died. Remarkably, TWO butterflies tagged in honor of someone in 2020’s Forever Journey campaign were recovered in Mexico, and THREE more butterflies were recovered the following year.

The Pearl advised us in 2021 that they would be unable to host the Festival going forward as they needed to focus on generating customers for their tenants and we found ourselves looking for a new roost. We moved the Festival to Confluence Park, and then in 2022, to Brackenridge Park, which remains the event’s current home.

In 2023, I retired as director of the Festival to focus on writing books, two of which have been published in the last year: The Monarch Butterfly Migration Its Rise and Fall, and Plants with Purpose: Twenty-five Ecosystem Multitaskers.

We launched our Forever Journey campaign in response to the COVID pandemic in 2020.

I’m extremely proud of the Festival and the programming and awareness it has spawned. Over seven years, we hosted top monarch scientists like Chip Taylor and Karen Oberhauser, invited celebrated biologists like Doug Tallamy and Mexican forester Cuauhtemoc Saenz Romero, and staged forums with climate change experts like Katharine Hayhoe. We also worked with dozens of community partners to organize pollinator gardening workshops, insect eating events for kids, beehive tours, native wildflower seed giveaways and free screenings of nature films. Check out recaps of Festivals past here.

My vision of the Festival always included using the monarch migration as a lens through which to interpret complex issues like migration, immigration, sustainability and resilience. That continues today.

Lucky for me, my very able colleague, Ashley Bird of Blooming with Birdie, has served as director and manager of the Festival since 2023. Bird started working with me as a collaborator in 2019 when I introduced her to monarch tagging at my house in downtown San Antonio. Like so many other before and since, she “caught the bug.”

Now she oversees the Festival’s vision, logistics and fundraising, a daunting task, especially these days. A former Montessori school educator, nature lover and child advocate, Bird is more than competent to run this show. She’s taken it in new directions incorporating technology and emphasizing child and family activities and even started a nonprofit devoted to the cause, Project Bloom.

Festival director Ashley Bird tagged her first monarch butterfly in my front yard on October 3, 2019. –Photo by Monika Maeckle

“Having watched the Festival unfold and grow over all these years and knowing how we’re reaching thousands of people, we feel a responsibility to find new and innovative ways to educate and influence the community,” said Bird.

Grant Ellis, San Antonio Parks and Recreation Department manager who oversees and partners on the Festival and the Pledge for the city, agreed. “Even if we didn’t have the Pledge, the Festival would still continue because its a vital force,” said Ellis, adding that the natural world across the board is facing threats for lots of different reasons. “If you stop ringing the bell, nobody hears it.”

I’m abundantly proud of these efforts and look forward to seeing the next iteration of the Festival take flight

Saturday, October 18, 2025
9 AM – 2 PM
at Brackenridge Park.

Visit Blooming with Birdie for complete details about the Festival schedule. And please stop by and say “HI.” I’ll be signing books betwen 10 AM and 1 PM. See you there!

TOP PHOTO: A child engages with a monarch butterfly at 2018 Monarch Butterfly and Pollinator Festival.–Photo by Drake White 

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