Letter from Susan Meyers

February 25, 2022 by Team Journey North

Susan Meyers from Monarchs Across Georgia provides the final Symbolic Migration update for the 2021-22 season and highlights her trip to Mexico. Estela Romero finished her school visits and distributed over 1,000 Ambassador Monarchs! Return letters and Ambassador Monarchs from students in Mexico will soon be on their way north. Thanks for your participation!

Letters and Ambassador Monarchs from students in Mexico. Photo: Susan Meyers

Amazingly, Ms. Romero finished her school visits during the first week of February. Over 1,000 Ambassadors were delivered to forty schools. To find out where your Ambassador landed in Mexico, use the search function at the top right of Symbolic Migration.

I arrived in Mexico on February 5 for a 10-day excursion to visit friends and the monarch sanctuaries, buy tags for Monarch Watch, purchase books for next season’s Mexico Book Project, and pick up the letters written by students as part of the Symbolic Migration environmental lesson taught by Ms. Romero. To my surprise, many of the younger students, who have not yet honed their writing skills, had created beautiful Ambassadors themselves to return to participating groups in the USA and Canada! You may receive one of these beautiful works of art along with a letter in your Return Spring Envelope.

We are filling Spring Return Envelopes now with life-sized butterflies and letters from students in Mexico and hope to have them all mailed via USPS by the end of this month. Remember that, as with the real monarch migration, not every life-sized butterfly makes the return trip. We do our best to return the same number of life-sized butterflies that you sent but it is not always possible.

Thank you again for your patience and support throughout this Symbolic Migration season. We hope that you will join us next season. Details will be posted in early August.

We would also like to acknowledge our donors and the Monarch Butterfly Fund’s Small Grant Program for making it possible for us to provide such high-quality books to Mexican schools. 

Susan Meyers
Monarchs Across Georgia Committee
Environmental Education Alliance

The Symbolic Migration project is a partnership project between Journey North, a program of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Arboretum, and Monarchs Across Georgia, a committee of The Environmental Education Alliance of Georgia, a 501(c) (3) organization. Journey North manages the interactive Symbolic Migration Participant Maps and hosts all educational materials on the Journey North website. Monarchs Across Georgia administers the program and is responsible for all fundraising.