Playing tag in the Smokies
Outdoor educator Wanda DeWaard and her family live in Walland in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains. Her 30-year passion for monarch tagging, education, and raising awareness about monarch conservation helped establish and sustain the volunteer monarch tagging program in Cades Cove in Great Smoky Mountains National Park (GSMNP). She now partners with Great Smoky Mountains Intitute at Tremont to continue the program.
Before DeWaard fell in love with monarchs, she first fell in love with common milkweed.
“It’s hard not to love milkweed because it’s not only a useful plant for cordage that can be made into string in a survival situation, it’s also edible and medicinal,” she said. Milkweed is also the host plant for monarch caterpillars that exclusively feed on it, making them toxic to birds.
Her love for monarchs began one fall morning in 1994. After successfully growing milkweed from seed, she was admiring the healthy patch while sipping her coffee. Then she noticed little holes on the leaves. After inspection with a magnifying glass, she recognized tiny monarch caterpillar hatchlings from illustrations of the butterfly lifecycle in her science textbooks. She placed one on her finger, ran inside to wake up her husband Scott, and put her finger in front of his nose to show him what she had found in the garden.
“I don’t know why I was so excited, but from that point forward, I just read everything I could get my hands on,” she said.
The couple had just been given a computer with internet, so she dove into learning about monarch butterflies and soon got connected to Monarch Watch at the University of Kansas to inquire about tagging them for citizen science, also known as community science.
Out of curiosity, she started collecting caterpillars from her milkweed patch and soon had about 80 specimens munching milkweed on her kitchen table. At that time, Monarch Watch wasn’t sure if they were breeding as far east as the Smokies. The budding citizen scientist looked at her kitchen table and said she thought they were.
In 1992, Monarch Watch began its tagging program, and three years later, DeWaard started tagging on her own. In 1997, she started working at Tremont doing environmental education and was still pursuing tagging independently.
“Anybody can do it,” she said, recalling one September when she gave a chrysalis to a neighbor for her birthday. DeWaard knew that a monarch emerging in fall would join the long migration back to Mexico, so she also gave her neighbor a tag.
“That butterfly she tagged on her birthday was found in Mexico, and it was a big deal,” she said.
When DeWaard’s first tag was found in Mexico in early 1998, excitement spread to the national park. Keith Langdon, then-supervisory biologist for GSMNP, asked if she would help establish a monarch tagging program for the park.
That year, along with park staff and a handful of volunteers, she began to lead small groups in tagging monarchs for the park service. In 2002, when the first tag from that program was found in Mexico, it made front page news.
“It was on the front page of the Knoxville News Sentinel,” DeWaard said. “It must have been a really slow news day,” she joked.
The finding was indeed newsworthy because it was the first proof that the monarchs migrate to Mexico from the Smokies. The volunteers that DeWaard was leading tagged that butterfly the previous fall in September 2001. Amazingly, another tag from that same fall was discovered 13 years later by a man in Mexico who found it on the forest floor. DeWaard now has that tag — number ABC318 — framed as a keepsake.
The program, now called the Butterfly Education Program, is still thriving today. Each fall, volunteers register through Tremont to learn how to catch, collect, tag and inventory monarchs. They meet in Cades Cove in small groups of ten or less, along with a few volunteer leaders trained by DeWaard. After the experience, volunteers get resources to be able to successfully tag on their own.
To register for the volunteer monarch tagging this September, visit the Butterfly Education Program page. Great Smoky Mountains Institute at Tremont will release the dates within a few weeks. For more information about the monarch tagging program, contact Wanda DeWaard at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
Over the years, data from the volunteer inventories and found tags has helped contribute knowledge about the Eastern flyway — the eastern-most migration route. DeWaard said that monarchs are coming through the Smokies much earlier and much later than Monarch Watch ever indicated.
“Because of getting out and watching for them in spring and fall, as well as participating in tagging, we’ve learned that there are waves of monarchs coming through,” she said. “We think what’s happening is the northern monarchs come through on their journey south, and then our monarchs in the Smokies come out of their chrysalises, which we then tag before they join the migration.”
However, DeWaard said that most everything she’s read about monarchs say they travel north, breeding along the way, then migrate south. The volunteer tagging program has shown that monarchs in the Smokies are not just migrating but also breeding. This finding is a testament to the power of citizen science.
Tagging also spreads wonder, excitement, and joy. When the volunteers found a butterfly in the park that had been tagged in Pennsylvania, DeWaard called the woman who had tagged it. She was excited because she vacationed in the Smokies every year and the finding gave her an extra sense of connection to the mountains.
DeWaard guides young citizen scientists on a tagging and educational outing in Cades Cove in Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
Connecting the dots for conservation
GSMNP is not only interested in monarch education, but also in managing the fields in Cades Cove for their conservation.
One day a park forester called DeWaard, saying that President Obama had issued a proclamation to expand federal efforts to protect monarchs and other pollinators and seeking advice. She responded that the park should stop mowing at certain times of year.
“Visitors like to be able to see wildlife, but you don’t have to mow in September when monarchs are on milkweed,” she said, emphasizing that conservation efforts need to be coordinated with maintenance crews.
The park now mainly manages the fields with burns instead of mowing, which has improved the milkweed growth. “The milkweed patches have gotten bigger, and we’re finding more caterpillars and more fresh monarchs in the fall,” she said.
DeWaard’s personal conservation efforts have also led her to make relationships with local farmers who have milkweed in their fields. Now they call her before they mow. Although DeWaard no longer raises monarchs indoors from her own milkweed patch, she still raises ones she saves from milkweed about to be mowed.
“Milkweed is essential when monarchs are breeding, so when they’re coming north from Mexico, they’re so in sync with it that when it pops up here, the monarchs are usually about 200 miles away,” she said, adding that climate change is shifting that synchronicity.
She notes that where there isn’t much milkweed available, the mama monarch might do an “egg dump” and lay more eggs than she would otherwise on a single milkweed plant. One year, DeWaard saw a small stalk of milkweed with 21 eggs on it. Too many eggs on one plant decreases their individual survival rate because of how much milkweed they need to consume before metamorphosis. After all, monarch caterpillars will grow by about 2,000 percent before they spin themselves into a chrysalis.
DeWaard also says that while many people know about the milkweed-monarch connection, monarchs also need nectar from fall flowers for their long migration to Mexico and for fat reserves to survive winter and lay eggs in the spring. Furthermore, people hear that monarchs are endangered, but DeWaard wants them to know that’s not the full story.
She says that monarchs will still continue to exist in resident populations, meaning they will survive in zones where they can live year round without needing to migrate for food.
“What’s endangered is the migration itself,” she said. “This is because climate change is drying up the nectar they need to travel south and survive the winter.”
The tagging program helps people connect the dots through education and awareness, as well as empowering citizen scientists to help monarchs, such as through planting fall-blooming native flowers.
Overall, observing and learning about monarchs has provided focus for DeWaard to broaden her outdoor education skills. Although she had an early love for science, she didn’t want to “pin and dissect every single thing,” and maintains that a person can learn by watching. “You don’t always have to read it in a book,” she said.
Since that first spark of wonder at spotting monarch caterpillars in her milkweed patch, DeWaard has helped spark that same curiosity and passion in countless others who are drawn to monarch conservation through citizen science.