Monarch Fest celebrates colorful migratory flyers
Event at zoo in San Antonio aims to show the public ways to care for and cultivate the orange-and-black butterfly’s populations
Charlotte Ponthier couldn’t believe her 6 ½-year-old eyes: Some of the largest monarch butterfly wings the Kerrville kid had ever seen fluttered by at the San Antonio Zoo last week.
The giant orange-and-black cloth wings were worn by staffers celebrating Monarch Fest. The real monarchs are just now fluttering through San Antonio.
At several booths outside the zoo’s butterfly exhibit, staffers wearing synthetic wings handed out clusters of milkweed and other butterfly-friendly plant seeds, while nearby a young woman with yellow capelike butterfly wings spun around in circles to beckon patrons for photos. And yards away by the gibbons exhibit, kids and grownups posed between a giant pair of wooden monarch wings.
Then there was the giant monarch just inches away from Charlotte’s face, a colorful hand puppet brought to life by zoo butterfly attendant Roxanne Jacobsen. When Jacobsen transformed the specimen from caterpillar to chrysalis to butterfly with a flick of her wrists, Charlotte hopped as if about to take flight herself.
That was the colorful majesty of Monarch Fest, the zoo’s celebration of the migratory butterfly that swings through San Antonio on its way to Mexico from as far north as Canada.
“The purpose of the festival is to bring attention to monarch butterflies,” said zoo education director Lisa Townsend, whose own orange-and-black wings punctuated her self-professed side hustle as “butterfly peddler.”
“And here in San Antonio, we are a monarch city.”
The zoo is a member of the Alamo Area Monarch Collaborative, a partnership of San Antonio agencies and individuals dedicated to butterfly conservation. And unlike those wearable wings, that “monarch city” tagline is no exaggeration.
In late 2015, San Antonio became the first-ever Monarch Champion City when then-Mayor Ivy Taylor pledged to the National Wildlife Federation to preserve the monarch butterfly’s habitat and to educate the community about the insect.
Hence outreach events such as Monarch Fest, which Townsend said educates the public on simple ways to care for and cultivate monarch butterfly populations.
Those tips include planting milkweed and other butterflyfriendly plants to fuel those longflying monarchs on their migration path and limiting pesticide use to just along the ground at the perimeter of your home.
“Think like the butterfly,” Townsend said.
That perspective reached multiple generations.
“I volunteer at a wildlife ranch, so everything deserves to live, especially butterflies,” said Floresville resident Esperanza Stine, who took in the Monarch Fest with her daughters Peyton, 4, and Paizleigh, 2, and their grandmother Toni Navarrete. “I think it teaches them to value life and beautiful things early on.”
Besides, those beautiful things could use a boost.
As recently as 1996, more than 1 billion monarch butterflies used to winter in Mexico, according to the Alamo Area Monarch Collaborative. But by 2013, those numbers dwindled to 56 million, what the conservation group considers a grave indicator of worsening ecosystems.
Monarch butterfly numbers have since bounced back to 200 million. But the conservation group warned that’s still 5 million short from ensuring species survival should another winter storm threaten their overwintering habitat.
Townsend said monarch butterflies are a part of San Antonio culture and heritage. In the fall, the butterflies tend to land in Mexico in early November, just in time for the Día de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead, celebration of lost loved ones.
Yet even after one of the nation’s worst winter storms in February and a global pandemic for the past year, the monarch butterfly marches on.
And while the only monarchs at the zoo were of the synthetic variety, Townsend said we should see real ones again real soon.
“We are incredibly fortunate in that we actually get to see monarchs twice,” she said. “We see them here in the spring, then we’ll see them again in October, as the migration goes to and from Mexico.”