The Current - Monarch Butterflies are making a stunning comeback

Episode Date: September 16, 2026

After years of decline, the monarch butterfly population is bouncing back. We speak to The Atlantic's Vann R. Newkirk II, who travelled to Mexico's Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve and tracked the migration journeys of three monarchs: Cinderella, Eric and Carle. He explains what's behind this butterfly's remarkable comeback and whether it can last.

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and Mexico's monarch butterfly biosphere reserve. Depending where you are in this country, you may have seen more monarch butterflies this summer. After years of decline, the monarch populations are on the rise. This is good news. Van R. New-Kirkewarm. The second is senior editor at the Atlantic traveled to Mexico's monarch butterfly

biosphere reserve where millions of monarchs from all over North America go to winter and from there tracked the butterflies north and explored what is behind their population increase and the threats they still face. He wrote an amazing piece in the Atlantic about this. It's called the return of the monarch and he joins us

now, Van, good morning. Good morning. The skies where I am are filled with monarchs. I was out yesterday and you couldn't count more than 10 seconds before you saw another one fluttering through the sky. It's very different than where you were down in Mexico. Describe what it looked like when you saw those thousands and thousands of monarchs together. Well, I would say it was millions and millions of monarchs together. I went to

their nesting grounds in Mexico and there were so many, as you hear, their wings were audible. It It was a background, constant background noise. They were on the trees from a distance. They looked like they were leaves on the trees or like bark on the side of the trees. It's really hard to sort of capture just how many there were. They were everywhere. They would land on your clothes. They were on the streams.

When you looked from afar, you would just see a blanket of orange. And it was absolutely beautiful. I was going to say, what goes through your mind when you see the blanket of orange? Yeah, well, I mean, it's really hard to conceptualize what a million of something looks like, what many millions of something look like. And you just get this sort of overwhelming awe. You read in this piece that the monarch migration is a wonder of the natural world. Just how, why would you use that language?

It's almost indescribable to explain kind of how. how they do this and what they do. Tell me what you understand about that miracle. Well, the one thing is, you know, you think about this animal that is seen all over the continent with you, I mean, you are in Ontario, I am in Maryland, and we are seeing the same species. In all of those butterflies, they, or their descendants, they come to this one little patch

of forest in Mexico, in the winter. That is amazing. And the fact that it's still around, even though butterflies, insects, animals of all sorts have been declining, especially on this continent, to me, that is something that is remarkable and worth preserving. What do we know about how they do this? They travel, as you mentioned in the piece, they travel upwards of 150 kilometers a day sometimes. People have seen them. at 10,000 feet? How do they do this? Yeah, glider pilots have seen them that high. So the generation that leaves Canada in the late summer, early fall, they are called the super

generation. They're bigger than the other butterflies that come north. And they are built for long distance, long haul flying. They, that generation, they spend months flying south. And somehow we think it's maybe quantum mechanics in their brain. They have a great compass for, they have different kinds of compasses, and they can find the exact patch of forest, sometimes the exact same tree that their great grandparents lived on in Mexico the previous winter.

It's incredible. It is. It's just hard to wrap your head around in some ways. I think so. You know, the scientists that I spoke to for the story, you know, they are, they've been studying these things for decades and still so much mystery left to exactly how they do it. So the story over the last little while was that they were facing, the monarchs were facing many threats and that their population was declining. But it now seems to be stabilizing. Is that fair to say?

I think the best way to put it would be they have increased over the past three years now that still would classify them as sort of near the all-time low numbers. But any bounce back is, especially when you're facing a steep decline, is a sign that something good is happening, that something is changing in a positive way. And what is that good thing that's happening? Well, I think right now the main thing that I point to in the story is conservation, is people are planting milkweed across the United States and Canada. People in Mexico are moving to protect the forests where they winter. And I think the evidence shows that those things actually matter. You also write, and this is a bit more philosophical, but you write in the piece as well,

that the monarchs persist because life's job is to live. Yes. And I think, you know, when we have these conversations about the mass extinction that is going on with wildlife on the planet, that is driven by humans, we kind of, that conversation, even though it's well-meaning, places the natural world as something that is kind of subject to humans. And I wanted to look at the butterfly has existed on this continent since the ice ages. It's been doing this migration. And it evolved this behavior to adapt to its environment. And animals, the natural world around us, is still adapting. It's still there.

It's still doing its thing. And quite frankly, after humans are gone, it'll still be doing its thing. And we need to understand that we are pieces in that. system and not the overlords of it. The great Canadian zoologists, Fred and Nora Urquhart, were among the first, if not the very first, to track the migration of the monarchs back in the 1950s. You were able to do this in a different way. You tracked three specific monarch butterflies, and they have names, right?

Right. They are Cinderella, Eric and Carl. Eric Carl, being the author of The Very Hungry Caterpillar, which is my daughter, was my daughter's favorite book. And this is the first year we have been able to track individual butterflies specifically. So we have these things called blue morpho tags that placed on individual butterfly their backs with eyelash glue. They can ping local cell phones and cell phone towers and mobile devices and tell you precisely where the individual butterflies are. So we have, and this is the first season, we've been able to do this, I could tell you where Cinderella, Eric, and Carl were

at pretty much any given moment. You just look at your phone or at a device and you could see where they happen to be. Yes. The creators of this tag, they have an app. They work in conjunction with Monarch Watch, and I could open my phone, I could type in the tag for the butterfly I was looking for, and I could see on a map where it was or where it had been. How did they do in their migration? So Cinderella and Eric, Eric was a female, as I told my daughter, they, you could see early on, Cinderella was a little bit more adventurous than the rest of her, let's say, her cohort. Eric was very restless, and she actually left earlier than the others.

And that may have not been great for her because it might have been too cold to complete the journey. And so she actually stopped transmitting. Carl, we didn't know exactly what the males did. They mate in the forest and in the mating, they give a lot of actual nutrients to the females and people theorized that they might just die out. And it seems that's what Carl did. He didn't transmit long. But Cinderella, she started her journey with the rest of the monarchs,

and she flew farther than any of the others. She made it across the Rio Grande through Texas, Oklahoma, up through Arkansas until she stopped transmitting. And hopefully along the way, she laid hundreds of eggs. You cheering her along as you're watching her on your phone? Oh, of course. I felt like I was watching sports. There is good news in this, in the stabilization, if we can put it that way, the population or the increase.

But there are threats as well. And some of the threats come from things that we have agency in. What is, I was saying earlier, my love of guacamole and avocado on toast, for example, have to do with the threats that the monarch butterfly faces? So who is still facing the destruction of their habitats. And as you reference the avocados, avocados in Mexico are Okambi, one of the major drivers of habitat loss there. Pretty much all the avocados eat, North America, come from this state in Mexico. And that forest is more and more tempting ground for, say, cartels that influence the avocado trade to clear.

and grow more avocados. So that's been one problem. And the other one that we're dealing with every day is climate change. So climate change changes where the milkweed grows, changes the ability of those forests to sustain themselves. And, you know, it is kind of the tidal wave in front of us that could make all the conservation efforts moot. Those conservation efforts are important, though, right?

And it's not to certainly underestimate the power of climate change. But one of the things you point out, and you've hinted at this, is that we have done things. We've planted meadowways of the plants that they need, particularly milkweed, to keep moving, that you talk about states having the butterfly on a license plate. What does that do to how we think about what we can do to save the species? Well, yeah, if you're in Canada, Canada has the actual protected highways

where you have to plant milkweed in the medians and on the sides. there are thousands and thousands of monarch butterfly weigh stations in both U.S. and Canada, where people are planting milkweed and other flowering plants that the adults feed on. There, I think it has become, the monarch has become a symbol of man's duty to nature in this continent. And I think that is like a pilot for me for, for, how we need to reframe our role in this world is we are stewards. We have the power, just as we have the power to destroy, to degrade this environment. We have the power to protect it.

And to me, the monarch is a symbol of that power. When you see them, just the last point, fluttering away above you, and it's not the millions of them, but just the one over your head as you're walking down the street. What do you think about? You know, I think if you had to ask someone who had never seen a butterfly, who never knew what one was, to draw it or to make something up, they would never come up with the actual butterfly in front of you. They're impossibilities. They're things that just are so, they should, they're wonderful in the true meaning of the word. They should inspire wonder in you.

And they have for me in my entire life. I've loved them. And, you know, we should understand that that wonder only exists sort of at our sufferance right now. And we should take care to preserve it for future generations. The piece that you wrote is fabulous and was passed around this summer among friends, like good news. In the midst of a lot of bad news, people were looking.

for good news, and this was ending up in a lot of people's hands. It's really good to talk to you about this. Thank you very much. Thank you. Van R. Newkirk II is a senior editor at The Atlantic. That piece that he wrote for the Atlantic magazine, you can find it on their website, is called The Return of the Monarch. This has been the current podcast. You can hear our show Monday to Friday on CBC Radio 1 at 8.30 a.m.

At all time zones, you can also listen online at cbc.c.c.com slash the current. or on the CBC Listen app, or wherever you get your podcasts. My name is Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. For more CBC podcasts, go to cBC.ca.ca slash podcasts.