Minneapolis festival celebrates monarchs' fall migration to Mexico
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This weekend, invite a monarch butterfly to sit in your hand.
“They smell with their feet,” says MaryLynn Pulscher, the environmental education manager for Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board. “They really are just amazing, amazing creatures.”
Pulscher is also the event manager of the Minneapolis Monarch Festival/Festival de la Monarca, which celebrates its 15th year on Saturday at Lake Nokomis Park.
The festival honors the monarchs’ annual fall migration, a 2,300-mile journey, as well as other connections between Minnesota and Mexico.
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In addition to more than a dozen education and habitat booths, where the black and orange butterflies will be hanging out, the festival features a prairie garden, food trucks, art, live music and performances from Ballet Folklorico Mexico and the Twin Cities Orchestra Salsa del Sol.
There will also be a kids parade at noon — “Wear your wings!” says Pulscher — and a monarch puppet show.
“As Minnesotans, our job is to really keep monarchs healthy, and get them fattened up for that flight back back to Mexico,” Pulscher says. The monarchs’ journey across North America is among the longest of insect species.
Due to habitat loss and climate change, the population has declined by about 90 percent since 1990, the equivalent of almost a billion butterflies.
The butterfly, however, has yet to be put on the endangered species list. According to the nonprofit Monarch Joint Venture, which will be at the festival, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will reassess the monarchs’ endangered status in 2024.
One way to help monarchs, Pulscher says, is to plant pollinator gardens with milkweed and the purple-flowered liatris ligulistylis, which she says folks can learn about at the festival’s plant education booths.
The spiky perennial “is like the candy store for monarch butterflies,” Pulscher says. “You can get five, six monarchs per stem of that in your yard. It's amazing.”
Pulscher says Minnesota is one of the key spots where the “super generation” of monarchs is born in the fall. The super generation lives up to eight months rather than the usual six to eight weeks of other monarchs. They also travel farther, flying from Minnesota to overwinter in Mexico, then flying north to lay eggs on milkweed plants.
“This super generation is pretty much unique, as is the migration itself, amongst insects, so we really highlight that,” Pulscher says of the festival. “And really, it's just the wonder of monarch butterflies themselves.”
