Kansas University’s Monarch Watch effort is getting more than half a million dollars to enable a butterfly version of the old “teach a man to fish” proverb.
The National Fish and Wildlife Foundation announced Monday that Monarch Watch would receive $527,154 for its “Building Tribal Capacity for Monarch Habitat Restoration” project.
Monarch Watch in recent years has been largely focused on cultivating and distributing milkweed plants to help restore monarch butterfly habitats, said director Chip Taylor, a professor in KU’s Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.
The “Building Tribal Capacity” project will train seven American Indian tribes in Eastern Oklahoma — whose lands are beneath the monarchs’ spring migration flight path — in habitat restoration.