Monarchs have made their way north, crossing state borders into Kansas, Missouri, Illinois and Virginia for the first time this season.

At the time of our last update, northward movement had been held up at the Oklahoma border, but we now have monarchs – and eggs – in the Show-Me State and Jayhawk State.

Roxanne in Springfield, Missouri, reported 14 eggs on April 12, just two days after also reporting the state’s first adult monarch sighting.

Monarch sightings continue to increase along the California coastal regions from the southern border all the way to Oakland, as well as in the Sonoran Desert in Arizona up to the greater Phoenix area. Remigrants will continue to work their way north and east through the West the next few weeks until they reach the end of their lives. But the next generation will soon appear and continue streaming to the Canadian border by summer.

From the Field

Diana Magor - Lighthouse Field, Santa Cruz, California

Over the past two weeks, the Journey North monarch maps have slowly started to fill in with more dots. But northward expansion has been limited, with the availability of milkweed and food sources keeping monarchs to their northern constraints at the Oklahoma border.

So far, we’ve received sparse reports of milkweed from the areas surrounding Kansas City and St. Louis, with shoots just barely poking through the ground. These plants should be usable for monarchs in a few weeks, but for now they just offer promises of what’s to come in the month of April.