Buckley Space Force Base is partnering with the US Fish & Wildlife Service and Monarch Joint Venture to preserve a habitat important to migrating monarch butterflies.
“Our typical mission is operationally focused here at Buckley Space Force Base,” said Captain Karissa Rodriguez. “But one of our main priorities is being a great steward to the environment.”
The migratory path of the monarch butterfly takes them over 2,000 miles from Canada to Mexico. They will stop to lay eggs on milkweed plants along the way, including at places like Buckley Space Force Base.
US Fish & Wildlife biologist Veronica Reed has been doing a lot to make the base an attractive place for the butterflies, such as planting more milkweed in designated natural areas.
“I'm doing a lot of things to not only restore the habitat for pollinators but also just to restore the habitat in general, because there's several hundreds of other species that do benefit, like native grasses, native birds, native insects that are not just pollinators," said Reed.
Monarch butterflies are pollinators and are vital to the environment. A prosperous butterfly population can have major benefits throughout the ecosystem. That’s one of the reasons Mercy Manzanares, the program coordinator for Monarch Joint Venture, is so interested in protecting the insects.
“I like to think of monarchs as an umbrella species, as a lot of the habitat restoration that we do for them can benefit a multitude of species,” said Manzanares.
Monarch populations are struggling. Over the past 20 years, they’ve declined between 48 and 69% within the eastern population, of which the butterflies that visit Denver are a part. The population west of the Rocky Mountains has declined by 99%.
To help get more valuable data on the butterflies and their migratory habits, Monarch Joint Venture has been part of a tagging program. They will capture butterflies at different places across the country and place tiny, harmless stickers on their wings. Those stickers have location markers so that researchers who find the butterflies elsewhere on the continent know where they came from.
“The monarchs do us a favor of gathering every single year, either on the West Coast in California or in the central highlands of Mexico,” said Manzanares. “We kind of get a snapshot every single year of what their populations look like.”
The U.S. military controls a lot of open, untouched space throughout the country. Conservationists have recognized that many endangered and protected species call these spaces home, and the Department of Defense has encouraged conservation efforts.
“There's been a big focus within US Fish and Wildlife Service, encouraging federal agencies and their lands to support monarchs, and not just monarchs but all pollinators,” said Reed.
For the men and women stationed at Buckley Space Force Base, the butterflies are a chance to appreciate nature and a reminder of the natural beauty in the Front Range.
“We're really excited to have our biologist, Victoria, here on the installation,” said Rodriguez. “We’re continuing to monitor to see how many monarch butterflies hatch here… and we're really excited to get some more supporters and get our American public educated on what we do here in the Space Force. And then definitely ensuring that we're preserving some of this very unique grassland that we have right in front of the Colorado Rocky Mountains.”
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