Tagging Butterflies

We purchased butterfly tags from Moths and Butterflies of New Zealand Trust that we offered to local schools/ECE centres to use. Then we went in and helped students to tag their Autumn butterflies. The students watched a video to learn about how to tag butterflies properly, then together they filled in the online form. That meant they had to work out whether the butterfly was male or female, look at what the weather was like, enter the tag number, the school address, and other important information to enter their butterfly into the nation-wide database. Then after putting the tag on the butterfly, they released it outside.

This is a way to track over-wintering butterflies to see where they go to. If someone finds our tagged butterfly next summer and enters the data into the system, we can see where it went to over the winter!

Learn more about this here: Tagging Monarchs - Moths and Butterflies of New Zealand Trust