Intro by Top Documentary Films
Watch the full documentary now (playlist – 51 minutes). Orange-and-black wings fill the sky as NOVA charts one of nature’s most remarkable phenomena: the epic migration of monarch butterflies across North America. NOVA’s filmmakers followed monarchs on the wing throughout their extraordinary odyssey.
To capture a butterfly’s point of view, camera operators used a helicopter, ultralight, and hot-air balloon for aerial views along the butterflies’ transcontinental route. (Learn more about the production techniques and adventure of traveling with the monarchs in an interview with Director Nick de Pencier.)
The film opens with caterpillars munching milkweed in southern Canada in late summer. Soon each caterpillar transforms itself into a silky chrysalis. Roughly 10 days later, a delicate four-winged monarch emerges.
Then, at some unknown signal, the monarchs take to the air on a two-month, 2,000-mile flight over fields, forests, cities, plains, open water, deserts, and finally mountains to congregate in a tiny, high-altitude region of central Mexico where they’ve never been before. Incredibly, they arrive by the millions at the same time each year.
Shedding light on this natural wonder are some of the world’s leading monarch researchers, including Lincoln Brower of Sweet Briar College, independent biologist Bill Calvert, and Orley “Chip” Taylor of the University of Kansas.
Putting the monarch phenomenon into perspective, Taylor says, “You’ve got a butterfly that’s originating in Toronto, or it’s originating in Detroit, Michigan, or it’s coming down from St. Paul or maybe even Winnipeg, and it’s moving south. Somehow it finds its way to Mexico. Could you do that?”
Food Freedom 
We viciuosly guard our swamp milkweeds here on our property, and have had many many Monarchs, their caterpillars and their chrysalis (what’s the plural for that word???) here. We are like lunatics when we see someone thoughtlessly mowing down a field of milkweed! You cannot but watch the sequence above and have no doubt about why they are considered by many indigenous peoples to be the reborn souls of the departed loved ones. The miracle that they are is, well, beyond words, really.
yay! a butterfly garden
When I was a child living in Pacific Grove, California on the shore of Monterey Bay, the monarch butterflies would come to our town every year on the same day. The grammar school and the city held a Butterfly Parade, which I’m sure they still do, fifty years later. All
the children had wings or hats to replicate the butterfly’s costume
during the parade walk through downtown Pacific Grove.
Unfortunately because of the health of the trees, there aren’t as many butterflies coming as before but we are told that some still do.
I’ve heard about Pac.Grove’s butterfly parade… I suspect the mass die off is from all the pesticides sprayed in CA
Great Post!! Thank you very much!