Brian Bockhahn carefully holds a monarch butterfly aloft outside the Gorges State Park Visitor Center. Here, at the edge of the Blue Ridge Escarpment, a view of low, rumpled hills stretches out for miles beyond. An audience of hundreds watches as Bockhahn gently affixes a tiny tag — a lettered and numbered polypropylene sticker — to one of the butterfly’s wings, decorated in brilliant patterns of orange, black, and white, like panes in a stained glass window.

A dozen kids surround Bockhahn, their hands held high. He places the fragile creature onto the fingertip of one lucky child. The butterfly pumps its wings once, twice — as if gathering itself — and then flutters away. “Good luck! Buena suerte!” Bockhahn shouts. The children wave goodbye as the colorful pilgrim turns south toward Mexico on one of Mother Nature’s most miraculous migratory journeys.

Kevin Bischof, Bockhahn’s colleague, admits that his true loves are trees and snakes. But when he saw migrating monarchs for the first time in 2012 while working at Gorges State Park, he was amazed — and inspired. “Wouldn’t it be cool to have an event about monarchs?” he thought.

Bischof soon left to work at another state park, and eventually two more. But when he returned to Gorges as superintendent in 2021, he pitched the idea to the Friends of Gorges State Park volunteer group. Just like that, the Mountain Monarch Festival was born. “The ultimate goal is to promote monarch butterflies and pollinators in general,” Bischof says. “People don’t know the full story — their declining numbers and the importance of habitat.”

No one does a better job of telling that story than naturalist and educator Ina Warren. The Brevard resident grew up awed by the flowers and pollinators that she found in her mother’s and grandmother’s gardens: butterflies and hummingbirds, milkweed, hollyhock stems and peonies. Like Bischof, she also had a monarch epiphany — one that changed her life.

Brian Bockhahn places a butterfly on a child’s finger at the Mountain Monarch Festival. photograph by Tom Moors

On an early September morning in 1977, Warren married her husband, Tim, in a sunrise service on the Blue Ridge Parkway. After the exchange of vows, “Morning Has Broken” played on a hammered dulcimer. Then, Warren witnessed a sight she’s never forgotten: hundreds of monarchs — a confetti of orange and black — burst from the chestnut oak trees where they had roosted overnight to continue their migration to Mexico. One of them dropped out of formation and landed on her wedding bouquet like a blessing. “They caught me there,” she says. “At that moment, I was hooked.”

Thanks to their timely display, the monarchs made a friend for life. For 47 years now, Warren has advocated for the butterflies as they’ve faced ever-expanding challenges, such as increasing insecticide use; fragmented habitat; suburban sprawl; loss of their host plant, milkweed; and loss of wildflowers as nectar sources. As a result, the monarch is considered a vulnerable species.

“Sometimes it takes an iconic species to catch people’s attention, to get them involved.”

Warren — who has made hundreds of presentations to a variety of audiences — has distilled the solution into a two-word mantra. “Plant flowers,” she says. “Repeat: Plant. Flowers.” Visitors flutter around her booth at the festival, fascinated by the butterfly enclosure where she shows off the monarchs she found earlier in the week near her home, temporarily interrupting their trek south.

Visitors also crowd into the park’s auditorium to hear featured presenter Heyward Douglass, an entomologist and former pilot who has visited the monarch’s overwintering grounds in the high-elevation forests of Michoacán, in central Mexico. These fragile insects, weighing less than a paperclip, travel up to 3,000 miles to go south, a cycle that repeats itself year after year.

For a long time, scientists knew that the butterflies migrated from as far north as Canada — but they had no idea how far south they’d travel. In 1975, the mystery was solved. “What a story it was to find the place,” Douglass marvels. He still vividly remembers the August 1976 issue of National Geographic that announced the discovery, its cover showing a woman in Michoacán surrounded by monarchs. “At that moment, monarchs went right to the forefront of my mind.”

Mountain Monarch Festival was created by Kevin Bischof and park volunteers. photograph by Tom Moors

In 2020, he finally traveled to Michoacán and the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve. He elicits gasps from the audience as he shares his experiences, telling how millions of monarchs swarm to that protected sanctuary and the oyamel fir trees that serve as their winter home. “The place is draped in monarchs,” Douglass says. “You can’t imagine how many — it pulls the branches down. The entire tree is covered, and you can’t see the bark.”

The autumn journey to Mexico is only part of the mind-boggling migratory story. In March, the overwintering monarchs begin the journey home, but they don’t make it all the way. As they move north, they breed and lay eggs, passing the baton to the offspring. This happens two to three more times, with each succeeding generation living up to six weeks while continuing north and creating offspring. It’s the last generation, emerging in August and living up to nine months, that completes the annual cycle by returning to Mexico.

Warren joins other naturalists in calling monarchs a “gateway bug.” “No one wants to get involved saving the stink bugs,” she says with a laugh. “Sometimes it takes an iconic species to catch people’s attention, to get them involved.”

At the festival, that involvement comes in the form of children racing around the park, showing off their monarch face paint, wearing their monarch dresses and kid-size monarch wings. Sometimes, it’s parents shopping for monarch-related gifts and engaging in scavenger hunts with their kids on nearby trails.

But to Warren, the most important involvement happens at the booth for Milkweed Meadows Farm, a native plant vendor from Fruitland. Nothing, she says, compares to the good that comes from people buying and planting native plants and making a home for monarchs in their yards.

“Attaching the sticker (to the monarch’s wing) doesn’t add any more weight than putting a sock on a kindergartner,” explains Ina Warren. “It doesn’t slow them down.” photograph by Tom Moors

“Native flower and tree species are the best choices in order to provide leafy larval host food for the caterpillars to make butterflies,” Warren adds. Milkweed might be the key to the monarchs’ survival: It not only provides food but also serves as the host plant for larvae as they transition from caterpillar to chrysalis to butterfly.

The monarchs showcased at Warren’s booth were some of the ones released by Bockhahn at the conclusion of the festival. Bockhahn serves as a regional education specialist for the NC Division of Parks and Recreation. Hired as a full-time ranger in 1997, he spent 14 years at Falls Lake State Recreation Area. Rather than a singular epiphany like Bischof or Warren, it took Bockhahn a series of incremental steps over many years to achieve full monarch geekdom.

“At Falls Lake, there’s a migration pathway where monarchs funnel through,” he says. “Over time I just got more passionate about them. When you start swabbing monarchs for parasites, you know you’ve become obsessed.” According to Bockhahn, North Carolina is critical to the migration of monarchs. “I call it the nectar superhighway,” he says. “At peak, they come through the entire state at different times. There are several geographical funnel points along their pathway.”

“The best thing about the monarch is that everyone is so passionate about the topic, and their excitement is contagious,” says Brian Bockhahn of the festival’s appeal. photograph by Tom Moors

Bockhahn participates in a range of monarch studies, including the tagging program run by monarchwatch.org. The tags that he places on the underside of each butterfly’s wing are a non-intrusive type of monitoring, he explains. “It helps fill in a lot of gaps in our knowledge.” Enthusiasts along the migratory path photograph or catch and release tagged butterflies, then log the collected data. Tagged monarchs are also identified at their winter roosting destination in Mexico. The tags help researchers better understand migratory routes, speed, mortality, and much more.

For Bockhahn, the festival’s popularity proves how enthralling monarchs are to just about everyone. And releasing newly tagged monarchs never gets old. “They’re going to fly over a thousand miles from that fingertip,” he says. “What amazes me is when they lift off and float back through the audience. They are unaware and unconcerned with us, and I get to see the smiles wash over people’s faces as they dance through the crowd.”

As Bockhahn releases the last monarch, tears fill Warren’s eyes. The payoff of her almost five decades of devotion to this insect shows in the faces of the children. Reflecting on the moment later, she says, “Kids were experiencing that up-close-and-personal connection with nature, and they’ll never forget it. For me, there’s no greater reward than that.”

For Bischof, Douglass, Bockhahn, Warren, and dozens of volunteers, the toil and effort of making the Mountain Monarch Festival a reality is more than worth it. Everyone in attendance leaves with a message that they can share — a message that, when multiplied, has the power to save a threatened species: Just. Plant. Flowers.

Gorges State Park
Mountain Monarch Festival
September 28, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
976 Grassy Ridge Road
Sapphire, NC 28774
(828) 966-9099
friendsofgorges.org/mountainmonarchfestival

Bombs Away: Click here to learn how to make your own seed bombs to create habitats for migrating monarchs.