Hand-made messengers winging from Fayette County to Mexico

By PAT NEWMAN
Staff Writer

More than 60 monarch butterflies took flight from Huddleston Elementary School in Peachtree City Thursday, beginning their annual migration to the mountaintop forests of Mexico.

Attached to their paper wings were messages in Spanish and English to the school children in Mexico, who will provide them a safe harbor until spring, when they will wing their way back.

“Mi nombre es Rachel Crosby. My name is Rachel Crosby. Soy ocho anos. I am 8 years old. Estay en el tres grado. I'm in third grade. Me gusta las mariposas monarcas. I like the monarch butterflies. Salvemos las Mariposas Monarcas! Let's keep the monarch butterflies alive! Las mariposas monarcas son muy bellas. The monarch butterflies are very beautiful. Gracia. Thank You, Rachel Crosby.”

This is the third year students in Lynda Fields' and Sandra Thomas' third and fourth grade enrichment classes have joined 80,000 students across North America to focus attention on one of nature's most beautiful and endangered natural phenomena. The colorful paper insects created by the Huddleston students will duplicate the journey made by the real monarchs, who winter by the millions in the forests' fir tree trunks and boughs outside Mexico City.

The project, called “Journey North - Symbolic Monarch Migration,” was gleaned from the Internet by Thomas. The two collaborated to create a unit on butterflies that includes work in the school's habitat. A portion of the habitat is planted with the type of flora that attract butterflies such as bronze fennel, dill and milkweed. “The butterflies come to feed in the garden and then find the milkweed,” Fields said, noting that milkweed serves as a host plant.

The butterflies from Huddleston will arrive this week at the staging area at the University of Minnesota, where they will be mixed to simulate the way monarchs blend together on their journey. The approximate date of arrival in Mexico is Nov. 2, in time for Dia de los Muertos, a commemoration of the spirits of the dead.

During the winter, the symbolic butterflies will hang on the classroom walls of schools in the migration area. In March, butterflies created by the Mexican school children will head north to their starting point.

Butterflies bearing messages and e-mail addresses have led to establishing some pen-pal relationships, according to Fields.

Not only do the children learn about the butterflies, which are now running the risk of extinction due to the gradual elimination of the special fir trees they seek, but about Mexico as well. “In third grade, we study about the butterflies. In fourth grade, students learn about the geography and culture of Mexico,” Fields explained.

For information about the monarch program, click onto its website at http://www.learner.org/jnorth.