Southwestern Oregon Community College Curry Campus invites the community to join us on Thursday, April 10, 2025, 1:00 – 2:00 pm (New Time!) for: Monarch Butterflies in Our Backyard.
This is a free program sponsored by the Friends of Curry Campus and will be held in the Community Room on Southwestern’s Curry Campus, 96082 Lone Ranch Parkway (off Highway 101), Brookings.
Dennis Triglia will talk about his love of the Monarch Butterfly, and the petition to have Brookings, Oregon become the first Monarch City in Oregon.
Vicki Mion and Patsy Haggerty were monarch enthusiasts and together with Dennis they started the Brookings Oregon Monarch Advocates (BOMA) group in 2015. They had monthly meetings, two Monarch Festivals in Azalea Park (2017 and 2018), and started collecting monarch butterfly eggs and milkweed for the students at Kalmiopsis Elementary School which were reared indoors away from predators in the garden.
Dennis rallied the support of Brookings City Council and BOMA was approved as a Monarch City in May 2017. In 2018, he applied on behalf of Kalmiopsis Elementary School for Monarch School USA in conjunction with having set up a pollinator garden in the Little Bear Patch Garden at the school.
MONARCH CITY USA was created in 2015 in Maple Valley, Washington as a nonprofit organization with a mission of helping the monarch butterfly population recover by encouraging local cities to plant milkweed and nectar plants within their borders.
Dennis has witnessed the decline of this beautiful species of butterfly. In 1980 Dennis visited Pacific Grove in the Santa Cruz area of California and saw millions of monarchs hanging from the eucalyptus trees like long orange-and-black blankets. When he revisited Pacific Grove forty years later in 2020, there were very few (perhaps hundreds instead of millions!).
Dennis will describe how Brookings and Curry County can protect and increase the population by creating habitat, collecting data for researchers and advocating for the reduction of insecticides and herbicides.
Dennis will share posters of the Monarch life cycle, preserved male and female specimens, cages in which folks could captively rear monarchs from eggs, lists of nectar plants and descriptions and photos of several species of milkweed. Milkweed is the only host plant on which monarchs lay their eggs.
Topics covered will be the Monarch life cycle, role as a pollinator, current conservation issues, how to rear them in captivity from egg-collecting through five caterpillar stages to the pupa (chrysalis) and ecloses (emerging from the chrysalis as an adult). Dennis will share some personal stories that he and other monarch enthusiasts have experienced.
Explore, grow, and create with the Friends of Curry Campus on the second Thursday of every month during the school year. Stay tuned for upcoming talks in our speaker series. For more information contact the Curry Campus at 541-813-1667.
