Eloise Ogden/MDN A monarch butterfly lands on Dr. Logan Wood’s finger. Roosevelt Park Zoo, Minot, has been raising monarch butterflies, a special project of Wood, and on Saturday, a “Flutter Fest” will be held when a number of monarchs will be released.

Dr. Logan Wood, veterinarian at Minot’s Roosevelt Park Zoo, is getting ready for a special event on Saturday at the zoo. That day about 30 tagged monarch butterflies will be released for their 2,000-mile trip to overwinter in central Mexico.

“We’re going to have a ‘Flutter Fest,'” said Wood. “It’s a community event in which people can learn about both the monarch butterfly and their life cycle, their migration route and then what can the community do to help promote monarchs within our community, be that North Dakota or be that Minot.”

“Flutter Fest” will be held from 10 a.m.-1 p.m., with the release of the butterflies at 1 p.m.

“We’ll be releasing butterflies that are actually tagged,” he said. He said each butterfly will have a small sticker and if the butterfly is collected, there’s a phone number the collector can call that goes to a national data base. The caller can say where they caught the butterfly and that information can be related back to the monarch released in Minot.

“This is to further scientific research to see how far they actually travel,” Wood said. He said there have been reports that butterflies tagged from the St. Louis, Mo., zoo have been located 1,500 miles away in central Mexico.

Visitors attending “Flutter Fest” also can visit the new Pollinator Waystation at the zoo. The area will help attract native pollinators like bees, butterflies and hummingbirds, according to a zoo news release. Within the Pollinator Waystation, a special area is being created for monarch butterflies to feed and lay their eggs on milkweed, their host plant. As the hungry caterpillars munch through it on their way to become adult butterflies, the milkweed plants will be removed to the Outreach Building on site to recover and re-leaf.

Monarchs have become classified as a threatened species, according to Wood.

“The monarch population has actually decreased by 70 percent over the last 20 years,” he said. In California alone, he said the 2017-2018 population, according to the most recent information, showed the number of monarchs dropped 88 percent. He said that’s a West Coast number and not necessarily the number for the Midwest. He said monarchs in North Dakota go to Central Mexico over winter.

The Minot zoo occasionally has wild monarchs but for the “Flutter Fest” project, the zoo obtained about 30 caterpillars from the Monarch Conservation Society and has been tending to them as they grow them into butterflies.

Wood said he’s pleased with the monarch project. “We’ve been having some great success growing them.”

He said people can get a glance at the pop-ups, tents for butterflies so they don’t beat up their wings on glass, in the Outreach Building by the dik-dik exhibit. “They’re kind of hidden but you can see them through the window,” he added.

The zoo’s Facebook page and Instagram has photos and time-lapse videos showing the stages of the monarch.

What can people in North Dakota do to help promote monarchs in the community? For example, he said they can plant flowers that promote pollinators. He said Mexican sunflowers are one of the plants to promote pollinators and various stores also carry a mixture of flowers that promote pollinators.

The monarch program is being planned as a continuing program. “We plan on doing this every single year. That’s our hopes,” Wood said. He said they are also looking into working with the Dakota Skipper, an endangered species in North Dakota.

Besides the monarch butterfly project being a pilot project for the zoo, Wood said it is also “something that’s close to my heart.”

“My mom was a elementary and special needs teacher for 35 years. I’ve always been interested in science and she always wanted to study life cycles. From tadpoles turning into frogs, we got into monarchs because we are so close to Monterey which is where the Pacific monarchs like to winter. So I got caterpillars,” he said. But, he said, it became harder to find the caterpillars so they could teach kids about the monarch’s life cycle.