After years of bad news, monarchs make ‘remarkable rebound’ (VIDEO)

After three years of significant drops in the number of monarchs making it down to Mexico to spend the winter, the butterflies have rebounded strongly this year.

Linda Goebel has been gardening in west Wichita for the past several years to encourage the butterflies. She has seen perhaps the most ever the past couple of weeks in her yard as the fall monarch migration has peaked in Wichita.

“Nobody’s been more worried about the monarchs than I,” Linda said. “I’ve got other people planting stuff.”

Last winter, the number of monarchs in Mexico dropped to their lowest levels since record-keeping began in 1993. The milkweed that they feed on in the United States and the trees they use for shelter in Mexico are being eradicated by genetically modified crops, construction, drought and illegal logging.

But earlier this week, I was walking into monarchs as they and the occasional swallowtail fluttered around Linda’s tropical milkweed. Linda plants the perennial native milkweed (asclepias), too, but the butterflies seem to prefer the tropical, she said.

“I do think we’ve seen a remarkable rebound,” Wichita naturalist Jim Mason said.

The numbers wintering in Mexico could be two to four times more than last year, Chip Taylor of Monarch Watch at the University of Kansas has said. Favorable weather seems to be the reason.

In my yard, where milkweed is not flowering now (you can buy different kinds to make sure there is a succession of bloom), I’ve seen orange and black beetles congregating on the seedpods. I saw some in Linda’s garden too. Linda said they could be left alone and wouldn’t do any harm.

The butterflies have been thick the past couple of weeks, but a weather front may have lifted them on their way by now.

“They look for northerly winds to help them migrate more easily,” Jim said. “If we get a good consistent north wind ... that may pick them up move them on out. They’ve got a long ways to go and they need to get there, so they’ll take advantage of good conditions whenever they come about.”

The butterflies have made Linda’s yard a destination for friends and a talking point for neighbors, she said. She and her gardening friends share seed and plants. Linda collects the seed in fuzzy pods from the tropical milkweed rather than letting the plants reseed themselves. That way she can plant the seeds after the last spring frost to protect them from succumbing to a late cold spell, and she can control where the plants come up.

Butterflies also love fennel, Linda said. One of her daughters is getting her master’s degree at K-State under entomologist Ray Cloyd. That stoked Linda’s interest in butterfly gardening.

While talking to me, Linda noted with intrigue that some of the butterflies were going into birch trees in her yard. She told me about the three types of swallowtails, caught sight of one and sighed, “Oh, they’ve just been gorgeous this year.”

She was on the lookout for swallowtail and monarch chrysalises and caterpillars as well as butterflies. “Oh, there’s one!” she exclaimed when she finally spotted a monarch caterpillar. “Cool! The monarch has antennae on both ends.”

She showed me one monarch chrysalis on the siding of her house. She thrills at the process, gently squeezing chrysalises to check whether anybody’s still home inside.

As the chrysalises mature, “you can see the monarch in there. It’s so cool.” A few days ago, “a couple escaped right on me. Fun.”

People need to be careful when cleaning up or harvesting seed not to rip a chrysalis off a plant, even into November, she said. That would mean a lost butterfly.

This story was originally published October 3, 2014 at 2:06 PM with the headline "After years of bad news, monarchs make ‘remarkable rebound’ (VIDEO)."