At this month’s Pikes Peak Outdoors Advisory Council meeting, Johnny Ochs of U.S. Fish and Wildlife shared something that should excite anyone who loves the outdoors: a new way to follow individual monarch butterflies on their epic migration — using the phone already in your pocket.
It’s called Project Monarch, and it’s built on a tiny solar-powered Bluetooth tag called the BlūMorpho. The tag weighs about sixty milligrams — roughly a tenth of a butterfly’s body weight — and gets glued to the thorax with a dab of eyelash glue. From there it pings a unique ID every few seconds, powered by a miniature solar panel.
Here’s the clever part. The tags broadcast on the same frequency as Bluetooth, so any smartphone with Bluetooth and location turned on can pick them up within about a hundred meters. Download the free Project Monarch app, and your phone becomes an active receiver — scanning, logging, and uploading detections to a shared map where you can follow individual butterflies in near real time.
Researchers used to know only where a monarch started and where it ended up. Now they can see the whole route: how fast it flies, where it stops, which habitats it depends on. That kind of detail could reshape how we protect the migration corridors monarchs need.
The project is a collaboration of more than twenty-five groups — Monarch Watch, the Xerces Society, the Southwest Monarch Study, and others — led by Cellular Tracking Technologies and the Cape May Point Arts and Science Center. Over six hundred tags went out this migration season alone.
Colorado sits on the western edge of the monarch’s range, where numbers are thinner than back east. So every detection here matters more. If you’re out hiking, birding, or just working in the yard and you see a monarch, open the app and scan. You might just ping a butterfly headed for Mexico — and help scientists figure out how to keep them coming back.
The app is free on iOS and Android. Turn on Bluetooth, head outside, and keep an eye on the sky.
Colorado Fish and Wildlife Conservation Office, https://www.fws.gov/office/colorado-fish-and-wildlife-conservation
