Monarch Butterfly Tagging Underway at One of County’s Pollinator Patches During September

ZANESVILLE, Ohio- Beginning this Thursday and for every Thursday in September, the Muskingum Soil and Water Conservation District will be tagging monarch butterflies that are living amongst one of the many butterfly gardens the organization has coordinated around the county. 

The monarchs tagged today were at the pollinator patch -which was just planted this past July- at the county’s Waste Water Treatment Plant. This patch of nectar-filled plants has been the product of cooperation between the Soil and Water Conservation District and the city of Zanesville. 

“We worked with the city of Zanesville this past year to put in a couple of pollinator plots. This is one of the bigger ones that we have here at the Waste Water Treatment Plant. They actually just put this in in July, and so you can see it’s already grown a whole lot. So it’s been really beneficial to them because now we have this entire habitat for monarchs as well as some other species, if you look around there’s lots of bees flying around and things like that as well,” Ashlee Kopchak, Education and Information Specialist with Muskingum Soil and Water Conservation District stated.

All the pretty plants in the pollinator patch are packed with plenty of nectar. The monarch’s favorite -the only plant they’ll eat- is the Milkweed. While they feast and pollinate, tagging and tracking butterflies may seem superfluous, but there’s a lot of vital information that can be gathered. 

“Mainly we just want to see how far they go, and their condition. Like any migratory animal, climate makes a really big impact on how they migrate. So if we can track how far they’ve come, how many times they’ve stopped, or where they’ve gone, it can tell us not just about that specific monarch but the species itself, as well as the climates within it,” Kopchak said.

Kopchak also added due to the success of this summer’s monarch tagging program they have plans to establish a pollinator patch at Riverside Park and alongside the entire stretch of I-70 through the city limits of Zanesville on each side once construction on the interstate is complete.