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Monarch butterfly migration is a story about motion, and I drew the butterfly completely still. The plate shows it spread flat and symmetrical, the way a specimen sits in a museum drawer. Nothing in the air has ever looked like that. It was a deliberate choice, because the migration was not proved by watching monarchs fly. It was proved by handling them one at a time.
TL;DRMonarch butterfly migration was proved in January 1975, when volunteers found the overwintering colonies in Michoacán. In the winter of 2025–26 those colonies covered 2.93 hectares, against roughly 18 in the mid-1990s.
Key Facts
What monarch butterfly migration actually is
The butterfly that leaves Ontario in September is not the butterfly that comes back. Monarch butterfly migration runs across several generations, and no single insect completes the loop. Spring butterflies fly north from Mexico, breed in the southern United States, and die there. Their offspring push further north. Two or three short-lived summer generations carry the population up into the Great Lakes and southern Canada.
Then something changes. The generation that emerges in late summer does not breed. It holds its reproductive development in suspension, flies south for weeks, and lives roughly eight months instead of five. That one long-lived cohort crosses the continent. It waits out the winter on fir trunks, then starts north again in spring. Scientists estimate around 21 million butterflies to a hectare of occupied forest, though the figure varies by year and site.
This is why the migration was so hard to prove. You cannot follow one animal from start to finish, because no animal makes the whole trip. The evidence had to be assembled from thousands of separate small observations. That is a slow and unglamorous way to establish a fact.
The paper tags that proved monarch butterfly migration
Fred and Norah Urquhart began work on the problem at the University of Toronto. The first tagging experiments ran from 1937. The technical difficulty came first. A tag had to be light enough not to unbalance a flying insect. It also had to survive rain, months of wear, and a mountain winter. They settled on a small paper label glued to the forewing.
Scale was the second problem, and volunteers solved it. Through the Insect Migration Association the Urquharts recruited thousands of people across Canada and the United States. Over twenty-five years the network tagged more than 300,000 monarchs. Late in 1972 Norah placed notices in Mexican newspapers asking for help. Kenneth Brugger replied in February 1973, and Catalina Aguado, who had grown up in Michoacán, joined the search with him.
They found the colonies on the slopes of Cerro Pelón in January 1975. A tagged butterfly recovered nearby had been marked months earlier, far to the north, by one of the Urquharts’ volunteers. The Urquharts described the site in the Journal of the Lepidopterists’ Society the following year. Twenty-five years of accumulated paper had produced one location.
The photograph that carried it
The scientific paper reached a few hundred people. What reached everyone else was the August 1976 cover of National Geographic. It showed Catalina Aguado standing inside the colony, coated in butterflies. Bianca Lavies took the photograph. In the article text Aguado was named once.
That imbalance is worth sitting with, because it repeats an old pattern. Natural history has always travelled on pictures, and the people who made the pictures have often been credited last. Maria Sibylla Merian published her Surinam insect plates in 1705, showing caterpillar, pupa and adult on the host plant together. Her images established metamorphosis as visible fact long before anyone wrote a satisfying account of it. You can follow that lineage through the history of botanical illustration. It runs directly to a magazine cover in 1976.
An illustration does something a dataset cannot. It gives a reader a body to look at, at a size they can hold. The monarch became a species people would fight for once it became a species people had seen. Merian understood that two and a half centuries earlier.
Where monarch butterfly migration stands now
The winter count is the measure everyone watches. Rather than counting insects, surveyors map the area of forest occupied by clustering butterflies. In the 2025–26 season that area came to 2.93 hectares, up 64% on the previous winter. That sits slightly above the ten-year average of 2.81. Published modelling puts the area needed for a stable eastern population at about six hectares. In the mid-1990s the colonies covered roughly eighteen.
The longer trend is harder reading. The eastern population has fallen by around 80% since the 1990s. West of the Rockies the decline exceeds 95% since the 1980s. In December 2024 the US Fish and Wildlife Service proposed a threatened listing under the Endangered Species Act. No final rule has been issued. Milkweed loss, habitat conversion and illegal logging all sit behind the numbers. Our monarch butterfly conservation guide sets out the detail. The Apollo butterfly faces a comparable squeeze in the European mountains.
Drawing the monarch
Drawing an insect this famous is mostly a problem of restraint. The orange is doing so much work that it wants to take over the plate. I kept it low and let the vein structure carry the image. The veins are what make a monarch legible at a distance.
The margins took the longest. A monarch carries a double row of small white dots along the dark wing edge. The spacing is not regular. Get them even and the wing reads as printed rather than drawn. I placed them one at a time. That is slower than it sounds, and it is the part of the plate nobody notices. That felt close to what the volunteers were doing with their paper labels. They were not describing a species. They were recording an individual.
The plate is hand-drawn from a specimen. Fiurdelin is a botanical illustration studio on Lake Como, Italy, with 53 published plates.
Styling monarch art at home
Fine-art print →
An entomological plate wants a quiet wall and a thin frame. Oak or dark-stained wood with a generous white mat suits the monarch. A heavy moulding competes with the orange instead of containing it. Hang the plate at seated eye level, in a study or above a desk. At that height the vein detail is close enough to read.
The monarch also sits well in a small group of three. Pair it with the Apollo and Scarce Swallowtail plates for a naturalist wall. All three share the same warm ground and the same drawing register. Keep roughly 6 cm between frames so the three read as a cabinet rather than a gallery hang. On a busy wall, one plate alone at a larger size does more work than three crowded ones.
FAQ
How far does a monarch butterfly travel during migration?
The autumn journey runs up to roughly 4,000 to 5,000 kilometres. Butterflies leaving southern Canada travel down through the central United States and into the mountains of Michoacán. Western monarchs make a shorter trip to overwintering groves on the Californian coast.
Does one butterfly complete the whole round trip?
No. The southward flight and the winter are made by a single long-lived generation. The return north is completed by its descendants over two or three further generations. No individual monarch sees both ends of the cycle.
When were the overwintering colonies discovered?
Kenneth Brugger and Catalina Aguado located the first colony at Cerro Pelón in January 1975. They were volunteers in the Urquharts’ tagging network, which had been running since the late 1930s. The discovery reached a wide audience through National Geographic in August 1976.
Are monarch numbers recovering?
Partly. The 2025–26 winter count rose 64% to 2.93 hectares of occupied forest, a second consecutive increase. That still falls well short of the six hectares associated with a stable population. Year-to-year counts swing with weather, so two good winters do not reverse a multi-decade decline.
How is this botanical art printed and shipped?
The print is made through the studio’s own print rail at prints.botanical.art. It is an archival giclée on fine-art paper or canvas, framed or unframed. Sizes run from 22 × 30 cm up to roughly a metre, and orders ship worldwide.
The plate
The monarch holds a study wall, or the space above a desk. Stand close and the veins are readable. It is the insect a continent of volunteers spent thirty-eight years following. It carries more weight on a wall than its size suggests. I drew it flat and still because that is how it was finally understood. Prefer to print it yourself? The digital file is on Etsy. The other entomological plates sit together on The Naturalist, which shows how they work as a group.
