A monarch fattening up on nectar for the journey ahead.
(Vern Fisher/Associated Press)

I've been fretting for over a month now. Last year by this time, the distinctively-coloured, migrating monarchs — the undisputed kings of the butterfly world — had pretty much taken over my Toronto backyard as well as the large, nearby park down by the lake, one of their regular stops.

This year, not a one.

But it turns out my worries have been misplaced. It seems that in their continental search for the only food that sustains them during reproduction — the noxious and hard to find milkweed plants — the monarchs scooted right by Toronto and straight into northern Ontario's cottage country and beyond. In fact, monarchs are showing up in apparently unprecedented numbers right across the Prairies and as far north as Prince Albert, Sask., and the city of Quebec.

On their way north from their wintering grounds in Mexico, the monarchs also seem to have flown straight by some of their other usual way stations near Atlanta and in the New York City area, to the dismay of amateur lepidopterists there. (This spring was also a bit of an off-season for dragonflies, damsels and other "odes" in the Georgia area as well, according to spotters.)

But according to Don Davis, the "monarch guy" with the Toronto Entomologists' Association, we can all lay our fears to rest: "The monarchs are doing exceptionally well this year," he says. The butterfly counts across Ontario, an annual event by devoted groups and backyard spotters, are turning up record numbers of monarchs, in some places as many as 10 times the count in previous years.

They showed up as early as the end of May in London, Ont., and Aylmer in western Quebec near Ottawa. And their distinctive J-shaped cocoons are dotting milkweed plants throughout the Muskoka and Haliburton regions in central Ontario — which means there could be a spectacular fly-off when it is time to head south again around the end of August.

Monarchs preparing for winter sleep in Pacific Grove, Calif.
(Vern Fisher/Associated Press)

But what really has Davis and other monarch watchers excited is that these amazing flying machines are venturing into the Prairies, probably as a result of awareness programs to try to stop the rooting out of milkweed.

"Winnipeg was festooned with monarchs in June," says Davis, "and we've had a number of sightings near Calgary and Brooks, Alberta" — places that haven't seen monarchs in years. There have also been sightings almost to where the prairie ends and Canada's boreal forest begins.

When it comes to these peripatetic wonders, Davis says, "they seem to be really expanding their northern reaches."

If true, that would just be another chapter in the almost incredible journey of the monarchs, a butterfly species that belongs in the tropics but somehow, over a few million years, developed a unique annual migration that can see them trek over 4,000 kilometres — from Mexico to the Great Lakes region and back in eastern North America, and from Southern California to southern B.C. and back in the West.

That's a migration, the only one of its kind in the insect world, that takes place every year over three or four generations and, with a decent tailwind, at speeds that can approach almost 50 kilometres an hour, which is not bad for a creature that weighs less than a sheet of paper.

The monarch industry

If the numbers hold, this will be the second gala year for the monarchs after a disastrous wintering season in Mexico three years ago and the double-whammy of running into Hurricane Katrina on the way south in the fall of 2005.

But they face real long-term problems. Their preferred wintering grounds, in a 60-kilometre stretch of forest just west of Mexico City and a eucalyptus grove in Southern California, are under siege from rogue loggers and human development, respectively. And their favourite food — milkweed, something they have an uncanny instinct for sussing out — is a banned weed in many jurisdictions and under attack from herbicide-based farming in agricultural regions.

Still, if they continue to prosper it will be because of a kind of year-round monarch industry that has sprung up around these indefatigable little aerialists with the distinctive markings (so bright as to warn predators that they are composed of noxious milkweed: eat at your peril).

As part of the North American Free Trade Agreement, Canada, the U.S. and Mexico have adopted the monarch as the symbol of their mutual environmental agency and have agreed to do more to protect its wintering grounds as well as its stopovers on the way north.

Canadian governments, for example, have established at least 13 monarch-friendly sites along the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence, places such as Point Pelee National Park southeast of Windsor, Ont., where hectares of milkweed grow unmolested.

The flight path

• In the eastern half of North America, monarchs winter in Mexico. They rouse themselves in late February and make their way north to Texas, Louisiana and Florida, where they lay eggs and die. (A female monarch can lay up to 100 eggs and then she dies.)
• That next generation then makes its way north to the Great Lakes region, usually arriving around late May or early June, in search of milkweed.
• The generation born in Canada in late July and August is the one that will eventually head south, usually around the end of August.
• They head to the East Coast first, often in great number, and then south, occasionally getting blown off course all the way to England.
• Scientists discovered a few years ago that monarchs navigate by an internal compass turned to the magnetic north as well as special photoreceptors in their eyes to measure ultraviolet light and therefore the angle of the sun in the sky.
• How the generation born in Canada finds its way back to that one special grove in Mexico — somewhere it's never been — is one of nature's mysteries.

But the real credit for the continued flight of the monarch has to go to the many amateur groups and butterfly spotters such as those at Monarch Watch at the University of Kansas, which runs an interactive database on the perambulating monarch so that spotters can keep tabs on the many sightings. And so ultra-watchers, like Kansas biologist Chip Taylor, can report from Mexico in late February on the "spectacular" number of monarchs streaming down a valley of the Cerro Pelon mountains, the majority apparently in good physical condition.

Because of groups like Monarch Watch, there are now upward of 1,100 dedicated way stations for monarchs in the U.S. and Canada, many in people's backyards. Because of pressure from groups like this, the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, for example, has agreed over the last few years to hold off on its milkweed eradication program; more recently, the town council of French River, Ont., agreed to plant a new milkweed garden after an existing patch was inadvertently bulldozed to make way for a new cemetery.

Today, schoolchildren in Mexico, the U.S. and Canada exchange photos and drawings of monarchs as part of an organized awareness project sponsored in part by foundations like the Garfield Weston Foundation. It is also one of several foundations heavily involved in planting new mountain forests in Mexico to help shelter the old growth trees where the monarchs like to winter.

Butterfly lovers can even buy milkweed plants over the internet to plant their own "monarch gardens." (Keep your pets away from them.) You can even buy monarchs themselves from a Toronto-based company that sells them for special events.

A palliative care facility in remote Rainy River, Ont., near the Minnesota and Manitoba borders, did just that earlier this week in fact, as a fundraiser and as a way of remembering individuals that were in its care.

How far these particular monarchs will travel is anyone's guess. But the Rainy River people were so buoyed by the release they plan to make it an annual event.