MONIKA MAECKLE
Monika Maeckle is a longtime journalist and nature writer based in San Antonio, Texas. Her first book, The Monarch Migration: its Rise and Fall, with University of Oklahoma Press, was published in 2024, and Plants with Purpose: Twenty-five Ecosystem Multitaskers, was published in May, 2025, with Texas A & M University Press.
Maeckle graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with an American Studies degree, and applies a holistic lens to all her endeavors. For years she has worked to raise awareness of monarch butterflies, pollinators, native plants and the ecosystems that sustain us all. She’s a Master Gardener, monarch butterfly tagger, recovering beekeeper and curious student of nature.
She worked closely with the National Wildlife Federation to convince the city of San Antonio to sign the Mayor’s Monarch Pledge in 2015, resulting in San Antonio becoming the nation’s first Monarch Butterfly Champion City.
With a long career in media and marketing including stints in Central America and New York City, Maeckle has a national following for her website the Texas Butterfly Ranch. She founded San Antonio’s Monarch Butterfly and Pollinator Festival in 2016 and co-founded with her husband Robert Rivard San Antonio’s independent nonprofit news site, the Rivard Report in 2012. The site became the San Antonio Report in 2018 and Maeckle continues to serve as a contributor. Her pollinator habitat initiative, launched in 2018, currently boasts more than 1,200 habitats.
She maintains a thriving wildscape/pollinator garden filled with plants with purpose at her home near the River Walk in downtown San Antonio. Many of the selections were harvested from her family’s Llano River ranch.
