Over the past few weeks, Iola has served as host to hundreds — or maybe thousands? — of visitors passing through town.
And for all but a select few, we never noticed.
But for Casey Driver, and others at the Southwind Extension office on North State Street, the passing migration of monarch butterflies has been a sight to behold.
The influx of the winged visitors prompted Driver to even establish the Extension office, and its small pollinator garden at front, as an official Monarch Watch Waystation this fall.
For the past two weeks, Driver would gently capture the butterflies as they flocked to the pollinator garden, placed a small identification tag on the monarch’s wing, and then released it back into the wild.
The butterflies are headed south, to a small plot of land situated in southern Mexico, for their winter roost.
The thing is, nobody knows exactly why they go to the same 4½ acre of forest each year, and how they know where to go, Driver said.
That’s because only the heartiest butterflies that are hatched on the southern route will make it all the way to Mexico. And of those, few will make it much past Texas next spring when they head back north.
But their hatchlings will instinctively go back from where their predecessors came, some as far as Canada, before the cycle renews and the southward migration begins late next summer.
“That’s what they can’t figure out,” Driver said. “By the time they get back here next fall, they’ll be four generations apart. It’s not like a mother hen who can pass along her behavior to her chicks. These guys have never been to Mexico.”
THE MONARCH project here happened almost by accident, after crews removed a decaying tree last year from in front of the Extension office.
Not wanting a barren spot in front of the building, Krista Harding, a Southwind horticulture agent, visited with area master gardener Patti Boyd about planting a pollinator garden.
“We’ve been very particular with what kinds of plants we’re putting out there,” Harding said.
Instead of random ornamental flowers, Boyd recommended asters, yarrow, zinnias, Russian sage, cone flowers, and milkweed.
A bird bath and large rock were also part of the display, to allow hatchlings a water source and a place to dry out before taking flight.
The milkweed is a popular magnet and the primary food source for the caterpillars that eventually will go through a remarkable metamorphosis and emerge from a cocoon as the brilliantly colored monarch.
