Citizen scientist Rowena Magee of Surf Beach, has had a fascination with monarch butterflies since she was a girl in New Zealand, when these distinctive orange and black visitors frequented her garden.
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Now, 19 years a resident of Australia, Rowena has embarked on a program of raising, tagging and releasing the butterflies from her home.
Rowena has been a hairdresser, owning her own salons, a major project admin for a power construction company and for some time, Rowena and her husband were relief managers for caravan parks and motels.
It was during this period, while in Castlemaine, Victoria, that Rowena rediscovered the host plant of monarch butterflies, the swan plant milkweed, and the first monarch she had seen in Australia.
She makes the distinction between raising the butterflies and breeding them, saying breeders breed and raise the butterflies in captivity and then often sell them.
Rowena collects the eggs from the milkweed, raises them and releases her butterflies two to four hours after they emerge from the chrysalis.
If Rowena tags the butterfly, she delays the release by a few hours to ensure the animal is acclimatised to its tag and strong enough to fly.
This begs the question - how do you tag a butterfly?
Monarch butterflies are the most delicate and spindly of insects - or are they?
According to Rowena, their looks belie them.
"They are quite a resilient butterfly....they look fragile but they are actually far from it," she said.
After all, this is a butterfly that has been known to travel thousands of kilometres between countries to over-winter.
Rowena cites one monarch in North America tracked and found to have flown 4200 kilometres to the Mexican mountains over three months.
The Australian of the species she suspects, like the New Zealand monarchs, were non-migratory, tending to stay local.
To confirm this Rowena was calling upon the public to inspect any deceased tagged monarchs they find, note the date, sex and tag number, go to the website and email her with the location information.
But what about the tagging? Rowena describes the process:
"Ok, so it's just a case of gently taking the butterfly by their thorax, holding them between two fingers and just with a toothpick that the label is on the end of, the label gets stuck onto the hind wing. They don't even know they have got the tag on - it's weightless," she assured.
To contact Rowena Magee with information of a found tagged butterfly go to www.mb.org.nz for contact details.
