Decades-Old Monarch Watch Tag Recovered
22 April 2026 | Author: Monarch WatchMonarch Watch’s Tagging Program has existed since 1992, and during the 35 years of the program, more than 3 million monarchs have been tagged by thousands of community scientists across the eastern United States and southern Canada. Each year, tags are recovered in central Mexico at the overwintering sites and across the migration range. Monarch Watch encourages taggers to check recovery lists every year to see whether any tags of theirs get recovered, including tags from prior years, as it’s possible for a tag to be recovered a couple of years later.
What’s a lot more uncommon is a tag getting recovered 29 years later.
Director Kristen Baum tracks down the recovered monarch from Monarch Watch’s extensive archive of tagging records.
A long-time Monarch Watch collaborator holds a tag from 1997, recovered from El Rosario overwintering sanctuary in central Mexico in 2026.
That’s what happened this past tagging season, a record in Monarch Watch’s tag-recovery history! We received an email the evening of February 4, 2026, from a long-time Monarch Watch collaborator who was buying tags for us at the El Rosario overwintering sanctuary in Mexico with the subject line “How old is this MW tag?” Less than 30 minutes later, Monarch Watch Research Project Coordinator Jim Lovett replied with “Monarch Watch tag TR416 is more than 28 years old.” The tag was issued to a high school in Wamego, Kansas, and applied to a female monarch in 1997.
Left: Candi Schneider tagged the butterfly in 1997 that would be recovered in 2026. Credit: Image provided by Candi Schneider. Right: Terry Callender led monarch-tagging programs at Wamego High School from 1992 to 2003. Credit: Tina Callender.
Tagging Program Time Capsule
Candi Schneider was a second-year student at Wamego High School (WHS) in 1997 when she tagged the female monarch that would be recovered 29 years later. According to our tagging records, Candi tagged this monarch with tag code TR 416 on September 24, 1997. Her biology teacher, Terry Callender, had been leading tagging efforts for several years at WHS, one of many schools that participated in the tagging program in its early years. The news of this tag recovery came as a pleasant surprise to both Terry and Candi, and they were happy to talk with us about their experience tagging monarchs in the early years of our program.
Terry, now retired, was a teacher for 45 years and taught at WHS for 25 of them. One of his biggest goals in teaching was to give students the opportunity to take what they were learning in the classroom and apply it out in the field or through hands-on experiences. When the Monarch Tagging Program began in 1992, Terry was one of 500 people who responded to Monarch Watch’s call for assistance to tag monarch butterflies, and he quickly become a leader in the program. The peak tagging years at WHS happened from 1996 to 1998. Terry’s classes still hold the record of the most monarchs tagged in any one year at 12,397 monarchs in 1996. In 1997, they tagged the most monarchs out of any one group or individual for that year at 11,405 monarchs.
Monarch Watch highlighted Wamego High School in our 1996 and 1997 season summaries. Archives of these season summaries are available on our website.
How were they able to tag so many monarchs? A lot of it came down to the right combination of location and student interest.
Wamego High School was the feature of numerous news stories over the years in local papers. These compiled clippings were provided by Terry.
“[In a local Wamego news article], they said Wamego was a hotspot, and it certainly was a hotspot, and we just happened to be at the right place at the right time and had students that wanted to tag butterflies rather than listen to me talk to them,” Terry says. “That’s one of the things I liked about Monarch Watch, is that it involved students, you know, actively in there learning, and there was a lot of learning done.”
Wamego was indeed a hotspot of monarch activity in the mid-to-late nineties. The butterflies migrated through in numbers that Terry says he hasn’t seen since. He recalls how masses of monarchs would roost in his backyard, across neighborhoods, in the city park, and in surrounding towns. In the evenings, his students would search for monarchs to tag. They’d place each retrieved monarch in an envelope for safe keeping until class the next day, when they’d tag the butterflies, record essential info on tagging data sheets, and release them to continue their migration.
Left: Some of Terry’s sons tag monarchs and record their data on tagging sheets in their front yard. Right: Terry sits with one of his sons to tag monarchs with some of Monarch Watch’s older rectangular tags used in the first couple years of the tagging program. Credit: Tina Callender.
“I do … remember tagging [the monarchs],” Candi says. “I remember putting the stickers on their wings.”
According to Monarch Watch’s tagging records from the fall of 1997, Candi tagged 23 monarch butterflies, all on September 24, 1997, including the one recovered this year.
Monarch Watch tags have evolved through the years. We started with a square tag, changed to a rectangular tag, and then pivoted to using the circular self-adhesive tags that we still use today. Credit: Graphic created by Kaziwa Abdulqader.
In 1992, Monarch Watch used square tags (called “alar” tags, originally developed by Dr. Fred Urquhart) that folded over the leading edge of a monarch’s forewing. From 1993 to 1996, we implemented rectangular tags that were attached to the discal scale of a monarch’s hindwing using glue. 1997 was the first year we used circular self-adhesive tags, as the forces of adhesion worked better on a circular tag than a rectangular one with corners. Since we started using these circular tags, the rate of tag recovery has increased from 1 in 5,000 to 1 in 100. This recovered monarch from 1997 would’ve been one of the first to have a circular tag on it.
This graphic depicts the total area occupied by the eastern monarch population at their overwintering sites in central Mexico. The last several years have been some of the lowest counts on record. Learn more about the monarch population decline via a 2024 blog post written by Monarch Watch Founding Director Chip Taylor.
A Phenomenon in Crisis
According to Terry, the monarch migration hasn’t come through Wamego in such volume since those peak years in the 1990s. This is a pattern seen not just in Wamego but also across the eastern monarch population’s range. Following the development of herbicide-tolerant crop lines, corn and soybean fields in the upper Midwest began to be applied with RoundUp in the early 2000s, which contains a non-selective systemic herbicide called glyphosate. Because milkweed can’t endure repeated uses of glyphosate, this new herbicide adoption became a major factor, among others, in the decrease of milkweed abundance throughout the Midwest. With fewer host plants available for female butterflies to lay their eggs on and for caterpillars to consume, monarch numbers declined along with the numbers tagged each fall in the Midwest.
Though the monarch population may be smaller than what it was in 1997 when Terry and Candi were tagging in Wamego, the value of community science participation has garnered even more importance. The data collected by dedicated participants, who need to work harder than ever to observe and tag monarchs in their area, both helps us understand the fall migration and how we can support the monarch population in a world where their host plant’s abundance is dwindling.
Creating, maintaining, and protecting monarch habitats, places that have nectar and milkweed plants, is a crucial way anyone can help monarchs and sustain their fall migration. Inviting students into a community science program like monarch tagging could be a first step toward a lifetime of appreciating and supporting the natural world.
Though his formal teaching days are behind him, Terry continues to live a “biology life” by studying and appreciating the natural world around him every day. Credit: Tina Callender.
Real Experiences in the Classroom and Beyond
Terry continued participating in the tagging program through 2003 before he retired from WHS in 2004. Today, he’s busy spoiling his grandchildren, trying new hobbies, and continuing to study and appreciate the nature around him.
“I think I live a biology life every day of my life,” he says. “Me and my family, we’re always doing something that relates to biology.”
Candi continues to enjoy the outdoors and loves photographing and identifying wildlife.
“I identify anything I do. So, if I go snorkeling, I identify fish. I like to identify birds. I identify butterflies,” she says. “And we actually just planted a bunch of landscaping plants out [on our property]. We bought some acreage a few years ago… and I’ve worked with the designer pretty closely to say, ‘Hey, I want flowers that will support butterflies and birds.’”
Maybe all the engaging hands-on experiences she had in Terry’s class had a positive influence on her, she adds. This sentiment rings true for Terry.
“I have never had a student tell me that they really loved my lecture on cell respiration,” he says. “And I gave a good lecture on cell respiration. But I’ve had – and still do have – students come up to me and tell me about tagging monarchs, they talk about making grass collections, … going to Nebraska to see the sandhill cranes. Those are the things that they talk about and the experiences that they talk to me about that they enjoyed so much.”
Thanks to the thousands of community scientists that participate in our tagging program, we’ve been able to understand more about the monarch fall migration. Credit: Ann Dean Photo.
The Tagging Program Today
Monarch Watch continues to be a leader in studying the monarch fall migration. What started as a project in 1992 with a few hundred volunteers (plus the assistance of a few thousand students) has now become a program that involves tens of thousands of community scientists from schools, other organizations, communities, and households across every state east of the Rocky Mountains as well as in five Canadian provinces. To date, the tagging data has provided information on the timing and pace of the migration, revealed that there’s a time interval we call a “migration window” that favors migration success, and shows us that the prospect of reaching Mexico is a function of distance and the pathway taken to reach the border with Mexico. More recently, the tagging data has revealed the impact of droughts and high fall temperatures on the number of monarchs that reach the overwintering sites.
The environment for monarchs is changing, and tagging will continue to show us how these changes are affecting monarch numbers.
To learn more about the Monarch Watch Tagging Program, visit our program page, notably our tag recovery lists. You can also learn more about how you can create monarch habitat on our Monarch Waystation Program page.
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