Utah woman works to revive Monarch butterfly populations

SALT LAKE CITY — A Utah woman, on a quest to revive declining Monarch butterfly populations, has become a kind-of “Johnny Appleseed” of the Milkweed plant.

Several years ago, Rachel Taylor was in her Salt Lake City garden and realized something was missing — the Monarch butterflies that filled her childhood in her then-rural Lehi neighborhood.

“We had apple orchards and you know, we played outside and life was really full of bugs and creatures,” Taylor said.

“It (seeing Monarchs) was just…common. You didn’t think twice about it to even notice them,” she said.

The Xerces Society said it’s latest count of Western Monarchs was 233,394, just 5% of what it was in the 1980s. (The vast majority of Monarchs are east of the Rocky Mountains, but that population has dramatically declined, as well. It’s estimated that from 1996 to 2020, the number of Eastern Monarchs dropped from 383 million to just under 45 million.)

Taylor said the problem has been pesticides, development and global warming — things that directly impact the insect as well as the plant — milkweed — that it depends on.

Monarchs lay their eggs on the plant. The caterpillars that hatch eat the milkweed and with it, the toxin inside that becomes the insect’s defense against predators.

That milkweed, though, has been crowded out by development.

“There’s no milkweed growing in ditches around here anymore because there’s no ditches,” Taylor said.

Growing milkweed on her own

So she started growing milkweed in her garden.

“Literally, within 30 days I had a Monarch laying eggs on the plants. That summer I had I counted 70 eggs in my side yard,” she said. “People started asking me for milkweed plants and so I started growing them in the dining room.”

Now, she distributes milkweed seeds and seedlings, encourages people to plant their own Monarch “waystations,” moderates a Facebook group of Monarch watchers and tags butterflies so they can be tracked on their annual migration to Mexico or southern California and back.

“I care so much about the creatures of this Earth and I can’t stop myself from helping and it’s really just coming from the heart,” she said.

You can request free milkweed seeds from Taylor’s website and also read and see more at the Friends of Monarchs Utah Facebook group.

You can contact the butterfly farm mentioned in the TV story by clicking here.