Field Notes: Monarchs on the Prairie
I wasn’t expecting monarch butterflies to be the highlight of our recent Southeast Colorado Wildlife Weekend. I can’t remember seeing a single monarch butterfly on past trips.
We were there to explore the shortgrass prairie and the conservation work happening across three Audubon-certified ranches and Southern Plains Land Trust. In a landscape like this, birds naturally get a lot of attention. And there were plenty of them.
We watched migrating raptors moving overhead. We found tiny gnatcatchers flitting through roadside shrubs. Burrowing owls, always a crowd favorite, watched us from the edges of prairie dog towns.
But everywhere we went, there were monarchs.
At Flying Diamond, we noticed them hanging in cottonwood trees and feeding on rabbitbrush. At Collins Ranch, there were more clustered in junipers. Then more again at May Ranch. By the time we had visited all three ranches and Southern Plains Land Trust, I realized I had seen more monarch butterflies in those three days than I can remember seeing in Colorado in the last 30 years.
Let that sink in. Three days versus three decades.
As I write this, the monarch super generation has begun its journey south. These are the monarch butterflies that will travel all the way to the high-elevation forests of central Mexico, where they’ll spend the winter clustered together in oyamel firs.
I couldn’t help thinking about what we had just witnessed.
These ranches are Audubon-certified because of the way they are managed for birds and the larger prairie ecosystem. Southern Plains Land Trust protects and restores prairie habitat through a rewilding conservation model. But monarch butterflies don’t know where one property ends and another begins. They simply need good habitat along the way.
For three days, we watched them moving through just that. Good habitat.
Some were nectaring. Others seemed to be simply passing through. And every time another flash of orange and black crossed in front of us, it felt like another small confirmation that these places are providing something important well beyond the birds we had come to see.
There’s another reason those monarchs made me smile over and over again.
Last winter, I stood among the largest overwintering monarch population Mexico had seen in more than a decade. Now, for the second year in a row, we’re seeing encouraging numbers.
There are still a lot of miles between southeast Colorado and the oyamel forests of Mexico. A lot can happen along the way.
But after watching so many monarch butterflies moving through healthy prairie habitat for three days, it’s hard not to feel hopeful about what we might find waiting for us in Mexico this winter.