Many thanks to all who made the 2012 event a success. This website still has 2012 information. We have set the 2013 date for August 31! Mark your calendars and check back as the event gets closer for updates.
Join us for a day of monarch butterfly fun as we fill a room with live butterflies and cut flowers. Visit the butterflies, watch how they are tagged, hold a caterpillar, and watch them emerge from chrysalises. This festival features Mexican food, crafts, butterfly plant sale and more.
The Monarch Butterfly Festival keeps getting bigger and better. Each year, Audubon transforms its auditorium into a magical area filled with wildflowers and free-flying butterflies. Citizen scientists in the back of the room tag the butterflies as part of a multi-year research project to understand the monarch’s amazing migration to Mexico each year. The entire life cycle of the butterfly, from egg to caterpillar to chrysalis to adult, will be on display. Visitors will be able to hold the largest caterpillars and a lucky few may even get to watch a butterfly emerge from its chrysalis.
This year’s festival will also feature Mexican food to help highlight the monarch butterfly’s eventual destination. Almost all the monarch butterflies in the Eastern United States fly to very few special spots in the mountains ofMexico.
There will also be free crafts, “be the monarch” photo opportunities, butterfly nets to borrow and a special monarch t-shirt sale to raise money for Audubon’s education programs. Visitors can tour the butterfly garden on their own or with a guide to learn about how they can use plants in their yards to help various butterflies.
All monarch butterflies will be released at 4:00 in a celebration in the butterfly garden.
