A monarch butterfly rests in the Rice Garden just outside the Field Museum, Aug. 9, 2023. (Antonio Perez/Chicago Tribune)
On a suburban street with smooth lawns and trimmed bushes, Martha Chiplis’ yard stands out. It’s not just the wildflowers: purple wild petunia, golden lanceleaf coreopsis, hot-pink Bush’s poppy mallow. It’s the lemon-yellow goldfinches that snack on the seeds, the fluffy bees that feed on the blooms.
And then there’s the star of the show: a monarch butterfly that descends within minutes.
The orange and black showstopper flies low and circles twice, so close that you can almost reach out and touch it.
“Oh! Yea!” says Chiplis, 58, of Berwyn. “They’ve been flying around all morning.”
At a time when monarch butterflies are struggling for survival, Chiplis is one of over 400 home gardeners throughout the Chicago area who have participated in a four-year Field Museum research project aimed at understanding how urban areas can provide much-needed habitat for the iconic insects.
The gardeners, who range from beginners with one milkweed plant to veterans with hundreds, have collected detailed data on monarchs, eggs and caterpillars in their yards, decks, community gardens and balconies — contributing up to 1,800 records each summer.
“We hope when we publish that it will show that these gardens can support (monarchs),” said Karen Klinger, a geographic information systems analyst at the Field Museum. ”It depends on the year, but one year people saw 7,000 eggs. So there are butterflies that are coming out of these native gardens.”
With experts calling for an “all hands on deck” approach to saving the monarch that includes planting milkweed in parks, agricultural areas and rights of way, Field Museum researchers, who concluded the garden-monitoring phase of their work in 2022, are now analyzing data that they hope will contribute to our understanding of how much private citizens’ backyard milkweed plantings can do for monarchs.
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