Karen Oberhauser is the former director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Arboretum and cofounder of the Monarch Larva Monitoring Project. She has four decades of experience researching monarch butterflies.
Oberhauser said that at this point in the monarch season, the butterflies are still living and breeding in northern ranges as far north as Canada, but she added that the earliest generation of migrators to Mexico are now about halfway to their destination.
“I just looked at those maps and I see some monarchs are showing up now in roosting sites way down in Kansas and even a little bit further south right now,” she said.