The artwork is displayed in the exhibit as a 18x24 inch photograph printed on canvas. The unmounted image printed on canvas (easily shipped in a sturdy tube for stretching or framing by your local frame shop) is $159.00. Or contact us about various custom framing and mounting options.

This image is available printed on either paper or canvas in a range of sizes from 10x14 inches to 18x24 inches.

Every autumn millions of monarch butterflies make an extraordinary migration from the Eastern United States and Canada. They fly thousands of miles south to an isolated forest section of the Sierra Madres Mountains in central Mexico between the states of Mexico and Michoacan. Up to 250 million monarchs winter here. When the air is cool and cloudy the huge pine trees are covered with a living blanket of butterflies. With their wings folded dusky side out, the butterflies look brown and drab. However, when the sun pops out, the monarchs flutter about in a blizzard of neon orange.

The Monarchs arrive in Mexico about the first of November - Dia de los Muertos, or the Day of the Dead. Mexican Indian people believe they are the returning spirits of dead children or the souls of lost warriors. The spring monarch departure to the north signals planting time in late March. The monarchs leave the Mexican state of Michoacan, looking for milkweed, the only plant on which their caterpillars feed. It takes three or four generations to reach the Great Lakes, New England and Canada. Once again as the days begin to shorten, the autumn monarch generation puts on extra fat, postpones mating and lives up to 12 times longer than the summer adults. The butterflies gather in Texas and along the Gulf Coast, following an invisible highway through the skies, heading south in waves to a distant place that their great-great-great grandparents left six months ago. No single butterfly has “been there before”or “knows the way”. There are still many unanswered questions about this mysterious migration.

The Mexican government set aside five small sites as protected biosphere areas in 1986. However logging continues because much of the forest is under private ownership.