Kyle Kellams: Downtown Springdale's Monarch Flight Festival gathers the community and celebrates the monarch butterflies' migration to Mexico. Ozarks at Large's Jack Travis attended the event this past weekend and he brings us this account from a Shiloh Museum butterfly enthusiast paired with the sounds of Latin dance music from Orquesta Afinke.
Marty Powers: And we got this Monarch Flight Festival going several years ago, and it's continued to grow. And this year it's the biggest it's ever been, and it's given us high hopes for next year.
Right here we're bringing monarchs, all the different life stages. We got eggs, caterpillars, chrysalis and butterflies. And we're just letting people see each of the life cycles, life phases and getting them, just familiarize them with monarchs and why they're so important.
Well, they're getting to see really the caterpillars are in. They're eating milkweed, the butterflies are nectaring on milkweed and lantana. And there is a pair that just mated in there right now.
I've been fascinated by monarchs for years and years. And so I started, we started having a milkweed giveaway when I worked at Shiloh Museum. And we're just trying to increase habitat for them and increase the number of monarchs because their numbers are so low. So I just decided, heck, this is something we can do. We can make a difference with.
Travis: Do you feel like you have made a difference?
Powers: I feel like we have. Absolutely. And we've given away 28,000 milkweed plants and over 28,000 packets of native plant seeds. And everybody responds. People show up for that. And so it's because of the way people respond that makes me think, yes, we've succeeded.
Travis: What do you like about the monarch?
Powers: Oh, I just, they're the most iconic butterfly there is. Everyone recognizes them. And their migration is what makes them special.
These guys, the monarchs you see here are going to go to Mexico and spend the winter, and next spring they'll leave Mexico. They'll mate and die. And then the fifth generation, the next generation, will continue on up into Canada and the northern U.S. And then over the course of the summer, there'll be generation after generation. And the fifth generation is what's going back to Mexico.
So it’s some place they've never been before, but their great-great-grandmother lived there. And somehow they know exactly where to go, when to go and where to go. It's fascinating.
It's kind of like the salmon, you know, a salmon swims out into the ocean, spends seven years, and they go back to the same stream that they were born in. The fact that these monarchs are able to find their way back to Mexico into the fir forest is just fascinating.
Kellams: That audio postcard from this weekend's Monarch Flight Festival in downtown Springdale, created by Ozarks at Large's Jack Travis.
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a rush deadline and edited for length and clarity. Copy editors utilize AI tools to review work. KUAF does not publish content created by AI. Please reach out to kuafinfo@uark.edu to report an issue. The audio version is the authoritative record of KUAF programming.
