ROYAL TREATMENT
Annual monarch butterfly tagging event delights, informs
POTTSTOWN >> Epic floods and tornadoes, western wildfires, southwestern rivers running dry, unprecedented political division and don’t forget a worldwide pandemic.
It seems the news is not chock full of many smiles these days.
Enter Ron Richael. For 28 years, the West Beech Street resident has been studying and photographing the monarch butterflies that visit his garden, which is specially tailored with the plants to attract them.
And for the last 20 of those years, he has been tagging them to track their 2,038-mile migration to their winter hibernation in the Mexican mountains.
It’s a big job though, so for the last several years, he’s had some help — from the Pottstown area’s curious children.
That help comes during his annual visit to the Pottstown Farm market, held every other Saturday morning in Smith Family Plaza in front of borough hall.
Saturday was the day he set up his table this year, drawing a sizeable crowd, who could not help but smile as they examined his
“When they’re ready to go, they can be very aggressive. They get pretty feisty.”
— Ron Richael, Pottstown butterfly enthusiast
butterfly pupa, caterpillars and live monarchs raring to get underway.
“When they’re ready to go, they can be very aggressive,” Richael told the crowd. “They get pretty feisty.”
“It’s been a great year for monarchs east of the Rockies,” he said. “For those to the west,” he said in reference to the California wildfires, “not so much.”
He said has counted 1,400 monarchs making their way through Pottstown this year. “There were only 170 last year.”
For years, scientists did not know where the monarchs went every year.
Then shortly after the turn of the century, a Mexican scientist discovered their secret mountain hide-out, said Richael.
“The eastern population of North America’s monarchs overwinters in the same 11 to 12 mountain areas in the States of Mexico and Michoacan from October to late March,” according to the U.S. Forest Service.
Monarchs roost for the winter in fir forests at an elevation of 2,400 to 3,600 meters (nearly 2 miles above sea level). The mountain hillsides of the forest provide an ideal microclimate for the butterflies. Here temperatures range from 0 to 15 degrees Celsius. If the temperature is lower, the monarchs will be forced to use their fat reserves. The humidity in the oyamel forest assures the monarchs won’t dry out allowing them to conserve their energy,” according to the forest service.
“It’s like being in a refrigerator,” said Richael. “It lets them hibernate”
He works with an organization called Monarch Watch, a project affiliated with the University of Kansas, which uses volunteer tagging efforts to track migrations.
The Monarch Watch website contains information about how to plant butterfly-friendly plants like milkweed, how to raise them in the classroom, and even information about how to create “a monarch waystation.”
“They do down there in the winter with $10,000 in $5 bills and Mexicans can earn $5 for every tagged butterfly they find,” said Richael, who noted most recently one tagged by an enthusiast in Boyertown was identified there.
Once released from Smith Family Plaza, the monarchs will travel 2,038 miles to their mountain hideaway, traveling roughly 80 miles per day.
That sounds pretty exhausting, but Saturday morning, the only thing that seemed to matter was the smiles the start of that journey evoked.