monarch butterflies

Karen Webster and I attended a monarch butterfly tagging at Cape May, New Jersey in October 2010. People with the Monarch Monitoring Project were netting the lithe little lepidopterans and tagged them with tiny numbered stickers. The project fell under the auspices of the Cape May Bird Observatory, a research wing of the New Jersey Audubon Society.

When we were there, Louise Zemaitis and others with the monitoring program, were tagging the orange-and-black butterflies and letting others release them. The photo above shows a little girl named Honey giving a recently numbered monarch its freedom.

Oliver Dattilo with one of 14 monarchs he caught

Six years later, October 2016, it was along Sparks Lane in Cades Cove in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

Clare Dattilo and Aimee Davis are both volunteers for Tiffany Beachy in the Tremont citizen science monarch-tagging program. With us were several parents with children from the home school classes I host at Ijams: Marie with sons Carpenter and Auzlo, Amy with daughter Kylie, Christina with son Malachi, Aimer with son Will, Clare with Oliver, Annabel and Fern, plus visiting New Yorker Annie Novak, author of “The Rooftop Growing Guide,” in Tennessee chasing and tagging monarchs on her own researching a book on monarchs.

- Supplied photos by Clare Datillo and Amy Roberts

Sparks Lane in Cades Cove, Great Smoky Mountains National Park

Clare Dattilo and the difference between a monarch and a viceroy

To the hunt

Monarch Monster,  Annabel

Field of white asters

My first catch, tagged with number WJL735

Our group