Amazing things are happening at the mountain schools surrounding the monarch butterfly sanctuaries in Michoacan, Mexico! This winter, each Journey North visit brings the school children stories about monarch life cycle, conservation, AND your small symbolic butterflies.

Travel Log
Do you ever wonder where your paper butterfly spends the winter? In this week's travel log you can take a peek at the work being done to spread your messages about monarch conservation. You will meet Melita, an enthusiastic volunteer. Using pictures and sharing notes from her journal, Estela will tell you a story about one special little kindergarten school visit. And finally, you will see how the butterflies are carried up rugged mountain roads in the back of a VW bug by our dedicated educators Estela and Melita.

• Travel Log
  

Grade 4, 5 & 6 students at Ignacio López Rayón School in Ocampo lined up the monarch life cycle in order. They just learned this today!

Your paper butterflies will be visiting schools in a mountainous region of Mexico where the real monarch butterflies overwinter each year. These are the main areas that will be visited this fall and winter:

• El Rosario Sanctuary area
• Chincua Sanctuary
• In and around the town of Angangueo
• Ocampo (between Angangueo and Zitácuaro)
• the Otomi region (only 18 km. from Angangueo).

See if you can find them.

Study the map (click to enlarge) and imagine where this year's schools are located.

How Many Butterflies Traveled to Mexico this year?
(Drum Roll...)

56,598 butterflies from 2,680 classrooms!

Monarch Math
In our last update we challenged you to some monarch math. Your estimates based on the numbers we posted in the last update were actually for only a portion of the total (our mistake). Here's the clue we published:

• Total weight of all Symbolic Butterflies shipped = 131.3 lbs
• A 7 lb Box of Butterflies contains 1,130 butterflies.

Given this information you could calculate that 1 lb = 161.4 (or 161.428) butterflies, and 131.3 lbs = 21,191.8 (or 21,195.496) butterflies.

Your estimates fell somewhere between 21,130 and 21,470.
BUT, the total was over TWICE that! That's muchas mariposas!

"All Aboarrrd?!" 2009 Symbolic Migration Passenger List

We are excited to present the passenger list of over 2500 classrooms who sent messages of goodwill to the students of Mexico.

• Check the lists for your school

This year we are proud to announce that 407 classrooms were able to send contributions for the Monarch Butterfly Sanctuary Fund. These students were able to gather and send a total of $7,573.54!

Stay tuned, we will proudly display the list of contributors in our January 15 Symbolic Migration Update.

January 15, 2010

• Monarch Butterfly Sanctuary Fund contributions list
  
• Where did they land? Search to find the school where your butterflies landed.