Monarch Madness 2026

Scott M
3 days ago
2 min read

2026 has been a surprisingly good year for Monarch caterpillars and butterflies (so far)

We launched 30 butterflies by mid March.

It's been a strange year for the monarch butterfly migration at our place. We didn’t get any caterpillars the fall like you’d expect. We got one in October, a handful in November and more in December. In January, we were finding caterpillars every time we checked the milkweed. We had over 20 caterpillars in the enclosure.

Caring for that many monarchs requires a lot of milkweed. A couple of caterpillars can eat all the leaves of a typical milkweed plant in a day. And it's January in Houston, which means native milkweed is hard to find to feed the caterpillars and cold snaps could freeze them. There came a point where we had over 20 caterpillars and were almost out of milkweed and a big freeze was coming to kill off the rest of our non native milkweed.

What to do?

Two words, giant milkweed at the Mercer Arboretum. My hope was that pictures of my sad, hungry monarch caterpillars would convince the folks at Mercer to help keep them fed.

Fortunately for the caterpillars, Erica at Mercer was very helpful. She and a few other arboretum staff helped chop off a ton of giant milkweed, enough to get the caterpillars to chrysalis. Plus we also found a ton more caterpillars that were going to freeze in the coming freeze. In the end, I left with a ton of caterpillar food and a ton of new caterpillars. (There are 15 caterpillars from Mercer in the picture below)

Thanks to the Mercer milkweed, the caterpillars survived the big freeze in our warm garage. We’d bring the enclosures out in the sun whenever it was warm and sunny enough. Over the next few weeks, the caterpillars would eat, eat, eat their way to fat caterpillars. And fat caterpillars eventually turn into chrysalis, which then turn into butterflies.

So many caterpillars!

It was fun watching the monarch's life cycle. Initially, the enclosures were full of caterpillars eating. Eventually a caterpillar went into chrysalis, then another, and another, until the enclosures became filled with chrysalis. And by mid February, the chrysalis started eclosing into monarchs! In total, we had 21 butterflies in our original enclosure and another 9 monarchs in the mercer enclosure. (we had lost a lot of caterpillars to parasitic wasps and flies and other diseases, but that is another story)