KAUKAUNA — The annual migration of monarch butterflies from North America to Mexico is under way, and the Fox River is among the major routes.
Naturalist Rob Zimmer also includes the Green Bay Botanical Garden, High Cliff State Park in the prairies, Mosquito Hill Nature Center, and so many other places are good locations to watch.
The migration will peak in about two weeks. But there will be hundreds, if not thousands moving south this weekend, Zimmer says.
He notes any place along the Lake Michigan shoreline also is prime viewing, from Escanaba and Washington Island through Door County south to Kewaunee and Algoma and Point Beach and West of the Lake Gardens in Manitowoc, all the way down to Port Washington, Milwaukee and Kenosha.
These migrating monarchs, a distinct generation that will not reproduce until the following spring, travel thousands of miles to overwinter in the mountain forests of central Mexico, where they enter a state of reproductive diapause.
You can observe them in open areas with abundant nectar sources, sometimes forming large, overnight roosts along rivers.
