Waystations needed to save monarchs

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

With the Kansas Wetlands Education Center and Cheyenne Bottoms in its backyard, Barton County is no stranger to butterfly tagging, and the each year, butterfly enthusiasts take part in butterfly counts throughout the warmer months. These efforts have shown numbers have dropped to critical levels over the past few decades.  Barbara Green, a representative of Monarch Watch, hopes more people will respond by creating monarch waystations.

At the 2015 We Kan Conference held in Salina, Green presented a talk about how to create the waystations, which are simply gardens in which the butterflies can find its most critical food source--milkweed plants. These islands along the migration route to Mexico are now a critical necessity if the species is to survive.

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