Dr. Chuck and I were exploring Grand Manan Island in New Brunswick when we came upon exactly the sort of scene that makes travel so rewarding: several people standing on a windy hillside with butterfly nets, carefully collecting monarchs.

Of course we stopped.

Before long, we were watching Adam Cheesman and Francie Morgan of Nature New Brunswick examine, test, measure, tag, and release one of the most astonishing travelers on Earth. They were so generous with their time and enthusiasm that we found ourselves caught up in the project almost immediately. There is something irresistible about meeting people who are completely absorbed in work they love—especially when that work involves solving mysteries that have been unfolding over our heads for thousands of years.

That chance encounter eventually led to this episode of the Conspiracy of Goodness Podcast, and the conversation led us into a much larger story—one that stretches from Canada across the United States, and into a very particular mountain forest in Mexico. It involves field notebooks, tiny numbered stickers, community scientists, a protected point of land beside a nuclear power plant, and now, solar-powered tracking devices so light that a monarch butterfly can carry one like a backpack.

The deepest story Adam and Francie shared with us was not really about technology, though. It was about what can happen when ordinary people become curious enough to pay close attention.

An Impossible Journey That Happens Every Year

Many of us know that monarch butterflies migrate to Mexico, but I had somehow missed one of the most extraordinary parts of that story:

The northward migration happens as a kind of multigenerational relay. A monarch leaving Mexico flies north and lays eggs. Its descendants continue the journey, generation after generation, until monarchs eventually arrive in places as far away as New Brunswick. No one butterfly makes that entire round trip.

Then, as summer begins to fade, something remarkable changes. Environmental signals produce an entirely different kind of monarch—one built for the long journey south. Instead of living only a few weeks and immediately reproducing, this migratory generation can live for roughly eight months. Its energy goes into powerful flight muscles, stronger wings, and the reserves needed to travel thousands of kilometers.

That single generation flies all the way to the high-elevation oyamel fir forests of central Mexico, where millions of monarchs gather for the winter. In spring, those butterflies begin the journey north again, laying the eggs that will become the next generation.

Now, stop and think about that for a moment.

No parent teaches these butterflies where to go. The southbound monarch has never been to Mexico, and none of its parents made the complete journey before it. Yet this tiny creature, weighing less than a paper clip, launches itself into a route that spans a continent.

Adam told us that holding one of these migratory monarchs never becomes ordinary. We may see them as delicate, but in the hand they feel strong, insistent, and very much occupied with their own agenda. Francie calls creatures like these “tiny teachers,” because getting close enough to notice them can rearrange what we think we know about fragility, resilience, intelligence, and possibility.

And Now, Some Monarchs Are Wearing Backpacks

For decades, monarch researchers and volunteers have used small numbered tags placed on the butterflies’ wings. A captured monarch is carefully examined for its sex, size, wing condition, and signs of a contagious parasite known as OE. If it appears healthy and ready for migration, a tag about the size of a pencil eraser is placed on its wing, and the information is entered into the Monarch Watch database.

The system has taught researchers an enormous amount, but it depends upon someone farther along the route finding or recapturing that same butterfly and reporting the number. Each recovered tag becomes one precious point on a very large map, with an awful lot of mystery between the place where the butterfly was released and the place where it was found.

Adam remembered sitting at the Point Lepreau Bird Observatory in 2022 with naturalist Jim Wilson, watching monarchs drift toward Grand Manan and wondering aloud whether technology might someday allow them to see where those butterflies actually went.

Only four years later, that possibility has begun to arrive.

The new BluMorpho tags are solar-powered transmitters weighing approximately 60 milligrams. Adam and Francie carefully attach them to the butterfly’s thorax using a specially selected, nontoxic athletic eyelash glue. Afterward, the monarch is given time to rest while the team confirms that it can move and fly normally. Then it is placed near a protected nectar source and, more often than not, takes off wearing its improbable little backpack.

A growing network of compatible tracking stations—and potentially participating mobile technology—can detect signals from the tags along the route. Instead of knowing only where a monarch began and where it was eventually recovered, researchers may be able to see a good deal of the journey happening in between as well.

Nature New Brunswick deployed only 22 of these tags during its first season, though they didn’t make grand pronouncements from such a small sample—and even those preliminary results delivered surprises. Some monarchs moved through Nova Scotia rather than following the expected route past Grand Manan and coastal Maine. Others traveled much farther inland than anticipated. One butterfly vanished from detection for eleven days and then suddenly appeared again in New York.

A Butterfly’s Journey, Connected to Our Own

Here is the part that stopped me in my tracks: these tiny transmitters use Bluetooth—the same wireless technology that connects our phones to headphones and speakers. With compatible technology participating in the tracking network, a nearby phone can help register a tagged butterfly’s presence and contribute a location report. A person going about an ordinary day could become one small connection in a continent-wide effort to understand an extraordinary migration.

That does not mean every phone with Bluetooth switched on automatically becomes a butterfly tracker. It means that familiar technology, connected through a participating network, can help researchers find an insect that might otherwise disappear from view for thousands of kilometers. The butterfly carries its tiny transmitter; the network helps fill in the map.

When we recorded our conversation, Adam and Francie were only about two or three weeks into this new tracking work. Already, Adam explained, the early findings were suggesting something remarkable: some monarchs were traveling at night. He has continued to emphasize that finding in his correspondence with us since the interview.

Think about what it takes to discover that. Watching butterflies in a meadow gives us one window into their lives. Recovering a numbered wing tag gives us another. But detecting their movements along the migration route can reveal behavior that people standing outdoors with notebooks and butterfly nets would have very little opportunity to witness.

These are still early observations, with plenty of questions to investigate about when, how, and under what conditions that nighttime travel happens. Yet within the first few weeks, the technology was already opening a new window onto a familiar creature.

I find that wonderfully hopeful. We have watched monarchs for generations, and they still have surprises for us. Now, a technology many of us carry in our pockets may help attentive people ask better questions—and give these tiny travelers a chance to show us what we have been missing.

This is science at its most exciting—a disciplined willingness to be surprised, and then to ask why or how about the surprises we’re given. Francie offered one of my favorite descriptions of an expert: someone with “a focused curiosity” about something. It’s true: look around you. The most trustworthy experts are seldom the people pretending to know everything. They are the people who have looked long and carefully enough to say, “We do not know yet—but look what we are beginning to notice.”

When Helping Nature Is More Complicated Than It Appears

Many caring people collect monarch eggs or caterpillars and raise them indoors, hoping to protect them from predators. The intention is lovely, and witnessing a caterpillar transform into a butterfly can inspire a lifelong affection for the natural world. However, Adam and Francie explained that raising monarchs in captivity does not automatically help the larger population. If it is done carelessly or on a large scale, it can create unintended problems.

For one thing, crowded enclosures may spread OE quickly from one monarch to another. Indoor conditions can also deprive a developing butterfly of the changing light, temperature, wind, and other environmental cues that may help prepare it for migration. Responsible captive rearing is possible, but it requires careful sanitation, very low densities, and appropriate exposure to outdoor conditions.

I found this part of the conversation especially useful, because it contains a lesson that reaches far beyond butterflies: good intentions are important, but they are not the end of our responsibility. Sometimes the most loving thing we can do is remain curious enough to discover whether our help is actually helping.

Fortunately, many of the best things we can do for monarchs are wonderfully simple—and do not require us to take control of the butterfly at all:

We can leave a small portion of a yard unmowed throughout the season. We can plant milkweed native to our own region, along with asters, goldenrod, and other late-blooming nectar plants. A five-foot patch, a strip along a fence, a balcony garden, or a corner of a schoolyard can become part of a much larger network of habitat.

And those plants will not serve monarchs alone. They will support bees, moths, other butterflies, hummingbirds, songbirds, and an entire food web that may already surround us, mostly unnoticed.

People who do not own land can still make an enormous difference as well; we can ask what our towns plant in public gardens, how frequently roadside edges are mowed, or whether an unused corner of a ballfield might become pollinator habitat. The National Wildlife Federation’s Mayors’ Monarch Pledge gives communities a practical framework for taking action. 

Sometimes one friendly question—or one little sign explaining why a patch has deliberately been allowed to grow wild—can change the way an entire community looks at what it once dismissed as weeds.

One Good Ecological Deed Is Never Just One Thing

Perhaps my favorite story in the episode concerns the Point Lepreau Bird Observatory, where Adam first imagined being able to follow individual monarchs along their journey.

When a nuclear power plant was proposed at Point Lepreau in the 1970s, local birders understood that the point was an important habitat for migrating birds. They were members of the community who had paid attention long enough to recognize that this particular place mattered. They did not have a grand conservation plan—they approached the corporation and asked that the important habitat be left undisturbed.

And the corporation said yes.

Over time, the protected area helped make the Point Lepreau Bird Observatory possible, and years of careful observation there eventually led people to notice that monarch butterflies were gathering and staging in the same landscape. That means that an area initially protected because people cared about birds was also sheltering butterflies, bumblebees, and many other creatures.

As Francie explained, one good ecological deed is rarely only one thing. Its effects ripple outward into species, places, and communities that no one could have anticipated at the beginning.

That is also why community science matters. Through programs such as Mission Monarch, Monarch Watch, and iNaturalist, an observation made in a backyard or beside a patch of milkweed can become part of something much larger. Nature New Brunswick has identified several important monarch staging areas because ordinary people noticed what was passing through their communities, took photographs, recorded what they saw, and shared the information. You do not need a biology degree to contribute something genuinely useful; all you need is curiosity, a little guidance, and the willingness to begin noticing.

Adam described curiosity as a skill—something we develop when we make room for it. Francie went even further, saying that a relationship with the natural world is our birthright. That includes people who were never taken camping as children, never learned the names of birds, or cannot travel to a remote wilderness—one can begin simply by sitting in the grass outside a library and looking more closely. 

That may sound far too small to matter, but consider where this entire story began: with people standing in one place long enough to notice what was moving through it.

The monarch is charismatic enough to draw us in, but it does not leave us there. It leads us toward other pollinators, entire ecosystems, new technologies, and communities of people who care. It connects forests in Mexico with gardens in Vermont, schoolyards in New Brunswick, tracking stations across a continent, and strangers who may never meet but are contributing to the same enormous puzzle. 

That is what one tiny traveler can teach us: that no useful patch of habitat and no careful observation exists in isolation.

So begin close to home. Leave one corner a little wilder. Photograph what visits it. Ask one curious question at a town meeting. Find the people who are already paying attention and offer whatever skills you happen to have.

Somewhere beyond your view, other people are doing the same thing. And together, all those modest acts may become the connected landscape a monarch needs to find its way home.

Nature New Brunswick
Learn about Nature NB’s conservation, education, community-science, and species-at-risk programs across New Brunswick.

Nature New Brunswick: Monarch Community Science
Find practical information about monitoring monarchs and milkweed, participating in wing tagging, and contributing observations.

Nature Saint John: Monarch Butterfly Conservation
Meet the local naturalist community whose volunteers have tagged and studied monarchs at Point Lepreau.

Point Lepreau Bird Observatory
Learn about the long-running migration-monitoring station and the landscape that later became important to monarch research.

Mission Monarch
Join a community-science program that gathers observations of monarchs and milkweed to identify breeding areas and guide conservation.

Monarch Watch
Explore monarch tagging, migration research, educational materials, habitat programs, and ways to submit tagging and recovery information.

Monarch Watch: Radio Tagging
Follow the developing use of solar-powered BluMorpho transmitters to track migrating monarchs.

iNaturalist
Photograph and share observations of plants, animals, and fungi. The community can help with identification, while qualifying observations contribute to scientific data.

National Wildlife Federation: Mayors’ Monarch Pledge
Learn how mayors, municipal leaders, and Tribal governments can commit to specific actions that create habitat for monarchs and other pollinators.

Motus Wildlife Tracking System
Explore the international network using automated radio telemetry to study the movements of birds, bats, and insects.

Birds Canada: Conservation Technology
Learn how Birds Canada supports Motus and other technologies that reveal wildlife movement and guide conservation.

BluMorpho Tracking Technology
See the lightweight, solar-powered transmitter technology being used in the emerging monarch-tracking collaboration.

• 00:00 — Intro & Welcome
• 05:27 — Why Scientists Track Monarch Butterflies
• 17:13 — How Monarch Tagging Works
• 25:45 — The Remarkable Monarch Migration
• 38:45 — The Chal lenges of Raising Monarchs at Home
• 46:10 — Break
• 50:04 — How You Can Help Monarchs Thrive
• 01:05:55 — Tracking Butterflies with Bluetooth
• 01:16:34 — Surprising Discoveries About Monarch Migration
• 01:21:17 — Curiosity, Community & the Future of Conservation