Sara Dykman made history when she became the first person to bicycle alongside monarch butterflies on their storied annual migration—a round-trip adventure that included three countries and more than 10,000 miles. This book is comprised of a perfectly calibrated mixture of daring adventure and exploration, nature writing and science communication.

The importance of milkweed to the survival of the beautiful butterfly, the lifecycle and evening tagging (who knew you could tag a butterfly) were fascinating. The quote below sums up some of what I find so important about learning more about the world around us .

Un libro que sin duda debemos leer todos los que vivimos a lo largo de la ruta migratoria de la mariposa monarca, ya que nos ayuda a comprender un poco mas lo intrincado del viaje que hacen estas mariposas para poder pasar el invierno en Mexico y regresar a EUA y Canada para su reproducción. Sara is an amazing woman who plans this trip to bicycle the path of the monarch butterfly's migration. The book is a lament for our thoughtless destruction of nature and at the same time a celebration of the beauty that remains.

But these complaints are a bit picky and didn't detract too much from my overall enjoyment of this book. This is a nonfiction short story about a girl who followed the migration of Monarch butterflies from Mexico to Canada on a bicycle. Algonkian Regional Park amphibians Audubon At Home Bald Eagle Banshee Reeks Banshee Reeks Nature Preserve bats Bird Atlas birding birds bird walk Bles Park Blue Ridge Center for Environmental Stewardship butterflies Celebrate Birds! With action comes connections – connections to a team that is growing bigger every year, and to a migration that is growing smaller but that we will not give up on… You can’t protect just one aspect of a traveler’s journey; to protect the traveler, you must protect their every step, every wing beat. The forest felt like a temple made by trees and worshipped by a congregation of wings folded in prayer.We both chuckled despite the fact that my joke, “I’m only breathing hard because I want to,” wasn’t that funny. When you think property rights are so strong that you have no obligation to consider almost any other thing, well it seems to me you are not responsible enough to own property. Dykman went on a trip, and a few things go wrong, but not very many, and certainly not in any dramatic way.

An extraordinary story in which Dykman seamlessly weaves together science, a real love of nature and the adventure and hazards of biking with butterflies from Mexico to Canada and back. Sie describes not being able to forgive those who destroyed pollinator habitat, even though she was describing farmers and general civilians who likely just didn't know. The ground held the coldest microclimates and the possibility of dew, plus the ever-present danger of black-eared mice ( Peromyscus melanotis). That would be difficult to recapture from audio, so I bought a copy of the hardcover book and am setting into it with my yellow highlighter in hand. Be thoughtful, respectful, and mature, especially when you are a self-proclaimed ambassador for the Monarch.She hopes her own adventures – walking from Mexico to Canada, canoeing the Missouri River from source to sea, and cycling over 80,000 miles across North and South America (including the monarch migration trip) – will empower young and old to dream big. Of course there were many passionate monarch people but I was captivated by the folks who didn't really know anything.