As millions of monarch butterflies make their way from Canada to Mexico this fall, you’ll have the chance to see some of these spectacular insects along the Alabama coast.

Several groups in Baldwin County — gardeners, utilities, hotels, and more — are now providing the necessary milkweed habitat for the threatened butterflies.

“Maybe you can’t save the world, but maybe you can save this part of it,” said Lee Weston, house grounds manager at the Grand Hotel in Point Clear, which maintains a pollinator garden.

It’s now one of five “monarch butterfly waystation habitats” in south Baldwin County. Baldwin is one of the fastest-growing counties in Alabama and among the fastest growing metro areas in the nation, adding thousands of new people and hundreds of new homes and developments each year.

It’s also home to the state’s only “Monarch City.”

Monarch City USA, an environmental group dedicated to preserving the butterflies, in June named Foley as the first “Monarch City” in Alabama.

And this month, the city got a new pollinator garden for the stunning orange and black butterflies at Riviera Utilities.It’s another habitat meant to provide nectar for the migrating butterflies and milkweed for them to lay their eggs.

In December, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed listing the monarch as “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act, following decades of population decline. The eastern monarch butterfly population, some of which stop in Alabama, increased from 2023 to 2024, but has still declined by 80% over the last few decades, according to the National Wildlife Foundation.

Part of the reason for their decline is the loss of their host plant: the milkweed. Monarch butterflies need milkweed in order to survive: they can only lay their eggs on milkweed. And monarch caterpillars only eat milkweed.

“Just to help one thing that’s struggling makes me feel good, and to know that the whole community is becoming involved gives me hope that we may as a whole be able to make a massive difference at some point,” said Weston, who worked to create the pollinator garden at the Grand Hotel.

And though Foley was just recognized as a “Monarch City” this summer, the efforts to create habitat for monarchs in south Baldwin County began several years ago.

Milkweed vs. Milkweed

On a hot Wednesday morning in July, dozens of families gathered at a small garden at the corner of Riviera Utilities’ headquarters in Foley. Volunteers from Foley’s public library read stories and handed out seed packets to children, who looked eagerly at a tiny monarch butterfly caterpillar crawling on the bottom of a leaf.

The garden features cigar plants, yarrows, and most importantly: three different kinds of native milkweed.

“As land is developed and land uses change, the native pollinator plants, the native milkweeds, the native population is declining because of land use changes,” said Josh Roberts, vegetation management superintendent at Riviera Utilities. “Monarch’s primary plant is milkweed…And so having native milkweed here is essential for the monarchs as they migrate from Canada to Mexico.”

Roberts pitched a pollinator garden starting in 2020. Riviera Utilities agreed in 2023, and dedicated a space for milkweed and native plants that the butterflies can rest and eat on. He connected with Weston to look at their monarch butterfly efforts.

Weston and the grounds crew at the Grand Hotel have long tried to plant flowers and plants that have a lot of nectar for the butterflies to feed on, knowing that monarchs would stop at the hotel grounds. A few years ago, Weston estimates, about 7,000-8,000 monarch butterflies stopped at the hotel on their migration and stayed for nearly a month.

The Grand’s pollinator garden had been going for a few years when she met Roberts, who was trying to get Riviera’s garden off the ground.

The two of them started working with Carmen Flammini, a scientist with Auburn University’s Cooperative Extension System. An agricultural engineer, Flammini first took an interest in monarch butterflies while she was living in Georgia, building a garden at her children’s school.

But Flammini quickly upended their efforts by telling them they had made a mistake: they planted tropical milkweed. If the monarch butterflies find the tropical milkweed too early in their migration route, they’ll keep eating it and never move on to their wintering habitat. It also may disrupt the caterpillar stage of the butterfly’s life, according to the University of Florida.

Roberts at Riviera and Weston at the Grand Hotel had both planted tropical milkweed in their gardens. They took it out and replaced it with native milkweed species. At Flammini’s direction, Graham Creek Nature Preserve in Foley planted native milkweed in one of its pitcher plant bogs, and just recently in a section of the preserve protected from deer, said Leslie Gahagan, the director of sustainability and natural resources for the preserve.

It’s paying off. Gahagan said the preserve is already seeing butterflies attracted to the native milkweed species. As the monarchs’ migration begins next month and goes into the fall, the hope is more and more butterflies will stop at these waystations.

Flammini is now advising five waystation habitats in the county. Pelican’s Nest Science Lab in Fairhope and the Gulf Coast Eco Center in Gulf Shores also have monarch butterfly habitats.

The Baldwin County Master Gardeners club, which is run through the extension, assists all of the waystation habitats in maintaining the gardens and studying the insects that use them.

More than butterflies

The pollinator gardens help more than just monarch butterflies, as other insects use the native plants as well. Four of the five monarch butterfly habitats are currently participating in a study with Auburn to identify bee species in Alabama.

The study looks to identify which of the state’s 400-500 bee species feed on native milkweed. A few days a week, trained master gardener volunteers go to the gardens and capture bees, to be sent off to Auburn for study.

Flammini also hopes to identify how native milkweed grows in Baldwin County, and how the monarchs (and other pollinators) interact with the plants while they’re here. The master gardeners count the number of eggs laid on each milkweed plant, how many caterpillars hatch, and how many make it to a chrysalis and adulthood.

The hope is to create a protocol for nurturing native milkweed, Flammini said. Eventually, she hopes to expand this study to pollinator gardens throughout the state.

These efforts to protect the monarchs have been met with enthusiasm. Almost 200 people attended Riviera Utilities’ pollinator garden opening events earlier this month. Weston said her family has now planted native milkweed at their homes.

The City of Foley, which owns Graham Creek Nature Preserve, is putting even more money toward butterfly conservation. The nature preserve is set to construct a conservatory for butterflies. While the indoor conservatory will be home to several butterfly species, monarchs will be the stars. Outside of the greenhouse, there will be pollinator gardens geared toward monarch butterflies.

“The intent was to educate all of our public that use the park on different ways that they could use native landscaping and concepts to attract more butterflies, more bees,” Gahagan said. “We could really increase the public education on how to create their own monarch pollinator type gardens.”

The conservatory is expected to cost around $400,000. The city of Foley is providing the majority of the funds. The Gulf Coast Environmental Engagement Center at the University of South Alabama provided $150,000 for the conservatory as well.

Flammini said she hopes the communal effort to aid monarch butterflies can be used as a symbol of what can be achieved if people are more mindful.

“To me, the monarch is more like a symbol of what you can do if you improve your ecosystem, and also the responsibility that we have when we plant certain plants,” Flammini said. “So instead of planting something that looks just pretty, why don’t we plant something that can help an insect to finish or prolong their life cycle.”