The 18 local Sparks who sent handmade replicas of monarch butterflies to Mexico City’s Museo del Nino (Children’s Museum) last fall are due to have similar paper butterflies returned bearing a message from kids in that country.
The exchange is part of an international awareness project focused on protecting the orange-and-black-winged insect.
The fourth-annual “Journey North Symbolic Monarch Butterfly Migration,” which draws participation from an estimated 45,000 children in Canada and the U.S., was timed last October to correspond with the real monarch’s journey south to its wintering grounds.
The return of the paper butterflies also was timed with the monarch’s migration north each spring.
Funding for the symbolic event was provided by the Annenburg Corp. for Public Broadcasting Math & Science Project and the U.S. National Fish and Wildlife Foundation.
United Parcel Service provided transportation of the paper butterflies to and from Mexico.
“The whole point is to make people aware of the plight of the monarch butterfly,” Sparks leader Marnie Cumming said Monday, noting its wintering grounds just outside Mexico City were severely threatened by deforestation.
“I’ve seen pictures of what it’s like down there [during the migration season],” she added. “Entire trees are covered with millions of butterflies–it’s quite amazing.
“[Sparks] talked about environmental issues and learned about one of the [world’s] endangered species,” Cumming remarked. “It was a fun way to educate the kids.”
While Northwestern Ontario sees its share of the monarch butterfly during the summer, its numbers are highly concentrated in southern Ontario, Quebec, and the northern U.S. where its favourite food–the milkweed plant–is most plentiful.
Female monarchs also lay their eggs exclusively on milkweed, which contains a bitter-tasting sap birds dislike.
An international conservation initiative underway since the mid-1980s has fought to preserve about 60 square miles of the monarch’s wintering grounds from logging activities.
The Monarch Butterfly Sanctuary Foundation, in conjunction with the World Wildlife Fund, continues to raise funds for monarch conservation and the provision of a long-term plan for the Mexican government that would help designate the wintering grounds as sanctuaries.
A WWF Canada fact sheet on monarchs said the mystery of their migration was solved by the use of lightweight wing tags, which directed people who found tagged monarchs to send them to Dr. Fred Urquhart at the University of Toronto.
After several years of searching, the first winter location of monarch butterflies was discovered in 1975 in the mountains west of Mexico City.
Monarchs are believed to orient themselves during migration using the position of the sun and the magnetic field of the earth.
Fort Frances Times
Local News from Across the Rainy River District
