Six Ways to Save Monarchs

With their vibrant orange-and-black wings, the monarch butterfly is one of North America’s most iconic species. But monarch butterflies are in trouble. Over the last few decades, populations have declined by over 90 percent and they have recently been added to the endangered species list.

The Problem

Like all butterflies, monarchs lay their eggs on select plants, called “host plants.” These are the only plants their caterpillars eat, and for monarchs, milkweed is their only host plant.

Unfortunately, milkweed is becoming harder for monarchs to find. Despite being ecologically important and ornamental wildflower, many consider milkweed just that, a weed. Even when milkweed isn’t being targeted directly, monarch habitat is gobbled up by development. Monarchs are also being directly killed by pesticides, both as caterpillars and as adult butterflies in farmlands and backyards.

This, coupled with threats to the monarchs’ overwintering grounds in Mexico and California, has resulted in the precipitous decline of the insect’s population in North America.

There is hope for the monarch, if we act now. The National Wildlife Federation and its partners are taking on the challenge, and we need your help.

Keep reading for Six Ways to Save Monarchs with NWF

Here are six ways that you can join the effort to make a difference for monarchs.

1. Garden for Wildlife – Providing the fundamental elements of habitat—food, water, cover, and places to raise young—is critical to restoring monarch butterfly habitat. Incorporate specific elements like native milkweed (for breeding) and other native wildflowers (for feeding) tocreate habitat. NWF’s Garden for Wildlife keystone native plant collections are chosen based on zip code, support the greatest number of wildlife, and bloom across multiple seasons.

2. Don’t Use Pesticides — Monarchs are insects, and so spraying insecticides will kill them. Make the commitment to avoid spraying pesticides in your yard and make the switch to garden organically.

3. Certify Your Habitat— The Certified Wildlife Habitat® designation by Garden for Wildlife provides an opportunity for gardeners to earn recognition for their efforts in helping monarchs and other wildlife. Through a certification process, the National Wildlife Federation provides a certificate and offers plaques for gardeners to proudly display that their gardens protect wildlife.

4. Help Save Grasslands — America’s native grasslands are critically important for monarchs. They offer both milkweed for monarch caterpillars as well as nectar plants for adult butterflies (and many other pollinators too). Today, more than 90 percent of native grasslands have been converted to cropland and development. Grasslands are disappearing faster than any other ecosystem in North America, and that’s a big problem for monarchs.

5. Support Highway Habitat Corridor —National Wildlife Federation works with municipalities and other landowners working to create pockets of monarch butterfly habitat in urban, suburban, and rural areas, including on agricultural lands, grazing land, land trust sites, parks, natural areas, schools, and municipal properties.

6. Get Kids Involved – The Schoolyard Habitats® program encourages students to create habitat for monarchs and other pollinators on their own school grounds. Using The Monarch Mission curriculum, students also learn about and improve habitat for monarchs by creating Monarch Recovery Gardens at their schools. These gardens provide a variety of field experiences for students and build community awareness about a national environmental issue while providing local solutions. In Texas, students and community members are empowered through Monarch Heroes—a K-12 environmental education and community outreach program—to create critical milkweed and nectar habitat for the monarch butterfly and to contribute, through citizen science, to ongoing monarch butterfly research.

NWF is committed to restoring the monarch’s habitat with your help. The scale of monarch habitat decline is vast, but by engaging communities in recovery efforts and empowering people to grow native plants like milkweed in the places where they live, work, learn, play, and worship, we can make a difference.

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Six Ways to Save Monarchs

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