Setting Wings, Hearts Aflutter

Monarch butterflies usually spend the winter in the shadows, but a group of Ventura youths is aiming to bring the city’s annual visitors into the spotlight Saturday with a festival at Camino Real Park.

This year, close to 1,000 of the orange-and-black beauties are at the park, said Johnji Stone, an interpretive program supervisor with the city of Ventura, and another expert estimates that there may be as many as 2,000 monarchs.

Both figures are down from some years, when as many as 30,000 have flown in, but there is still plenty to see this year, event organizers say.

The festival, which will be held from noon to 3 p.m., will feature storytelling, games, insect displays, origami and talks and demonstrations from butterfly expert Walt Sakai.

The event is being organized by nearly three dozen youths from the Loma Vista 4-H group.

After coming up with $1,050 in grants from the Jane Goodall Institute and the YMCA Earth Services Corps, they set to work planning an event to raise awareness of the insects’ annual migration.

They expect the festival to attract hundreds of nature lovers and hope it becomes an annual event.

The teens decided to spotlight the monarch, said Nancy Merrick, a physician and the mother of two of the youths organizing the festival, because of the philosophy that “every kid should work to help the things that are precious to their area.”

For Merrick, the adult leader of the project, there is a feeling of coming full circle. While in college, she worked with Goodall in Africa for seven months, studying mothers and infants in a group of free-ranging chimpanzees.

It was a wonderful experience, Merrick said, and “now I’m looking for ways to pay her back.”

Merrick’s daughter, 15-year-old Kate Lairmore, is the group’s youth leader. Kate, a 10th-grader at Foothill Technology High School in Ventura, isn’t a newcomer to the world of butterflies.

She spent a week last summer trekking along the monarchs’ migration path, from Seattle to California.

She also has helped Sakai, a Santa Monica College biology professor, tag the monarchs with stickers. That is easier than it sounds, Kate said.

“They’re very hardy creatures,” she said. “They can stand up to a lot.”

The butterflies begin arriving in late October or early November, in search of warmer weather.

Camino Real Park typically gets thousands of monarchs, Stone said, because it has “the perfect microhabitat ... that will give them a safe place to spend the winter.”

Sakai said it was hard to tell why the numbers vary so much from year to year.

Since the butterflies are coming from all over the Western states, their numbers could be affected by everything from a drought in New Mexico to a late winter in Colorado to pesticides in Idaho.

The butterflies also move up and down the coast, Sakai said. This year, there are many fluttering around at the Ellwood woodlands near Goleta, but next year the monarchs could move farther south.

At Camino Real, the butterflies’ location tends to change each year, although they usually cluster in the eucalyptus groves in the park’s barrancas.

This year, many of the monarchs are viewable from the walkways near the tennis courts.

Everyone is invited to the free festival. School groups can arrange visits by calling the Ventura Community Services Department, Stone said.