JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Vann Newkirk has a very serious job at The Atlantic, where he's a senior editor. But he also just really loves butterflies, and we're talking about monarch butterflies to be specific. So much so that he spent time with them in Mexico to get an update on the state of the monarch butterfly in 2026. And here's some big news. Those butterflies - they're back in a big way. Vann Newkirk wrote about his trip for The Atlantic, and he's here with us in studio to tell us exactly what he found. Hi.
VANN NEWKIRK: Hi.
SUMMERS: So, Vann, I mean, this trip sounds incredible. How did it come together?
NEWKIRK: So I have been interested in the monarch butterflies (ph) for my entire life. So I've seen over the years, the numbers have been declining pretty dramatically, and I really wanted to go to see the overwintering grounds in Mexico sort of before they may disappear. But as it turned out, the year I chose to actually go, they were doing a little bit better than before.
SUMMERS: When you think about the monarch population today, what are some of the biggest challenges out there?
NEWKIRK: So the populations have been - they've been increasing for the past two years, but that is from an all-time low. And the biggest challenges right now is - it's climate change. So now, climate change, even if you do replant the trees and all the milkweed, it might make milkweed unable to grow in some places, even in yards where people have planted it. And it may destroy the forest in Mexico. So we really have - everything seems to always come back to this one giant, global issue, and I wanted to focus on one facet of it.
SUMMERS: So, Vann, for people who don't know as much about monarch butterflies as you do, why are they so important to the natural world, to our ecosystem?
NEWKIRK: Well, when you think about the monarch, they're sort of an indicator based on how well they are doing. So this is a species that can tell us about the conditions in Mexico, the conditions in the Midwest and the conditions in Canada. That's a very important species. There are very few that give us that much range of information.
SUMMERS: I know that you got to track three butterflies on your trip. Tell us about that.
NEWKIRK: So thanks to this new technology, these trackers that are about the size of a grain of rice...
SUMMERS: OK.
NEWKIRK: ...They put them on the backs of the butterflies with eyelash glue.
SUMMERS: Oh, wow.
NEWKIRK: (Laughter) So now we have another use case for eyelash glue. And now, with these trackers, we can see almost exactly where the butterflies are going. And so I took the opportunity to follow three butterflies from the Sierra Chincua Sanctuary in Mexico.
SUMMERS: I love the names. I understand you may have had a little bit of a hand in helping name them, is that right?
NEWKIRK: Yes. My daughter's 6 years old, and I asked her what we should name them. And so the first one was easy. That was Cinderella. The second - she thought for a moment - and she knows "The Very Hungry Caterpillar" by heart, and so she said, Eric Carle.
SUMMERS: Perfect. Is there anything you learned on your trip in your reporting that surprised you?
NEWKIRK: One thing that really surprised me was the role of avocados. The forest, where they go to winter - those are very tempting targets for people to burn or clear in order to grow avocados. So if you've eaten avocados in the U.S., you've likely eaten avocados that were grown, sometimes illicitly, on the land where the butterflies need to come for the winter.
SUMMERS: We've been speaking with Vann Newkirk. He's a senior editor for The Atlantic and a known butterfly enthusiast. Vann, thank you.
NEWKIRK: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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