Newport Wilderness Society Presents Monarch Butterfly Lecture

The Newport Wilderness Society and Newport State Park invite the public to attend “Grand Saga of the Monarch Butterfly,” a presentation given by Professor Lincoln Brower on Monday, June 15 at 7 pm. The lecture will be held at Newport State Park in the Hotz Wilderness Room.

Professor Brower has studied numerous aspects of the monarch butterfly since 1954, when he was a graduate student at Yale University. Since January 1977, much of Professor Brower’s research has focused on understanding why monarchs fly up to 2,000 miles to central Mexico in order to spend the winter in beautiful colonies on two-mile high mountaintops.

Ominous and ongoing illegal logging of the butterfly forests motivated Professor Brower to initiate a Geographic Information System analyses with Mexican and US colleagues to document and track the logging. Of simultaneous concern is that fact that monarchs’ breeding range in the US and Canada is increasingly threatened by genetically engineered crop agriculture.

Professor Brower’s talk will weave together this saga of 55 years of research on the marvelously complex, beautiful, and intriguing behaviors of the monarch butterfly.

Newport State Park is located at 475 County Road NP, Ellison Bay. For more information call 920.854.2500.