By Michelle Cohen
Arizona-Sonora News Service
Thursday, Oct. 7 -- Gail Morris knows butterflies.
And certain times of the year, the Chandler retiree is usually with her butterfly net in the middle of a Southern Arizona field.
Morris was recently tagging a monarch butterfly in an area known as Canelo southeast of Sonoita in Santa Cruz County. She said she took time off from her administrative job about four years ago, thinking, "I was going to go back to my job, but I started getting back into the nature of things."
Morris worked as a docent at the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix before volunteering at Southwest Monarch Study, an online organization that studies monarch butterfly migration patterns in Arizona and invites volunteers to tag monarchs on their mitten-shaped wing cells.
She also works as a trainer for the Monarch Larva Monitoring Project, a national program that monitors breeding grounds.
Little is known about the butterflies' migration pattern in the West, which is why it's important to study them, said Dr. Orley "Chip" Taylor, a professor at the University of Kansas and director of Monarch Watch, an educational program based at the university.
Taylor said it's important to know where the western populations spend the winter. "We pretty much know this for the eastern monarchs, but the western monarchs are really not well studied," he added.
Taylor said that thanks to the tagging program, researchers know that some of the monarchs go to Mexico while others go to the California coast.
Taylor added that western populations are extremely low and declining because droughts and warming climates are ruining habitats and destroying milkweed. "There's lots of evidence that high temperatures and dry conditions have a negative impact on the reproduction of these butterflies," he said.
Morris said the monarchs' populations hit a low point last winter, and she's now collecting data for the Southwest Monarch Study and a national databank. She said she travels throughout southern and central Arizona as often as she can and sometimes brings her husband, students and friends with her.
"I not only do monarch tagging; I push education and encourage everyone to plant more milkweed," Morris added.
The monarch is sometimes called the "milkweed butterfly" because its larvae eat the plant.
Scottsdale resident and butterfly enthusiast Laura Miller, who was with Morris during the tagging trip to Canelo, said she met Morris about a year ago at a Central Arizona Butterfly Association meeting.
"I mentioned I had a monarch in my yard the spring before, and Gail tapped me on the shoulder," Miller said. "Two days later, I called her and we tagged a couple in my yard."
Fully equipped in her white T-shirt, khaki pants, boots, hat, sunglasses and fanny pack, and wearing butterfly stud earrings, Morris set off on her hunt for monarchs.
Miller, also in khaki pants and with a camera in hand, was right with her.
Blue and white soft-mesh butterfly net in hand, Morris easily moved through the thigh-high grass on the side of a road while explaining that the Canelo area of wildflowers and willow trees has one of the richest ecosystems for monarchs in the state.
After about 15 minutes of walking, Morris spotted her first monarch and waited for the female butterfly to lay her eggs on a milkweed plant before catching it in a net.
"I never want to interrupt a female laying eggs," she said. "That's too important. We have to make sure that our zeal for tagging doesn't interrupt their life cycle."
Morris waited for the butterfly to stop flapping its wings before carefully taking it out of the net and holding it by its wings between her index finger and thumb.
"They are delicate and you don't want to hurt them," she said. "But the other part of it is that some of these guys have flown 3,000 miles in their migration, so they're not as delicate as we think."
Morris grabbed a blue, round sticker small enough to fit on her index fingernail. It had a tracking number and the Southwest Monarch Study's email address written in black. She gently placed it on the monarch's wing.
"You want to put the tag in this little mitten-shaped cell, called the discal cell," she said.
After snapping a few photos of the butterfly with the tag in view, Morris released it.
Morris spent a couple of hours tagging about 10 butterflies that day and said the number of monarchs tagged in a day varies. She said she plans to continue tagging butterflies for as long as she can.
"It's all a love affair," she said.
Another version of this story appeared in The Tombstone Epitaph.
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