HUDSON, Fla. — National home builder Taylor Morrison is partnering with the National Wildlife Federation to help save the monarch butterfly population.
Taylor Morrison is building homes in Palm Wind, a community located in Hudson.
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Within the community, Taylor Morrison built a garden that attracts monarch butterflies.
"They can come and make this their permanent home. This isn't just something that's going to go away. It's a permanent fixture within this community," said Corrin Godlevske, a community management manager with Taylor Morrison.
Godlevske said Taylor Morrison has built butterfly gardens within all their communities since 2019. Another garden can be found at the Esplanade Azario community in Lakewood Ranch, near Sarasota.
These gardens feature milkweed plants and nectar plants. Monarch caterpillars only eat milkweed. It's a host plant and monarch caterpillars depend on it as a food source and cannot survive without it. Monarch butterflies rely on nectar plants as a food source.
David Mizejewski is a naturalist with the National Wildlife Federation. He said the butterfly population has been declining for years.
"Monarch butterflies used to be one of the most common butterflies found all across North America and unfortunately, in the last few decades their populations have really plummeted, habitat loss, pesticides, climate change," he said.
As of December 2024, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed a listing of the North American migratory monarch butterfly as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.
According to the National Wildlife Federation, monarch butterflies are one of the few migratory insects. They travel great distances between their summer breeding habitat and their winter habitat. In the summer, they range as far north as southern Canada. In the fall, the eastern population migrates to the cool, high mountains of central Mexico, while the western population migrates to coastal California, where it spends the entire winter.
"Inspire people to plant monarch gardens that have these native nectar plants like asters and goldenrods that bloom in the fall that will field the migration, but also our native milkweed plant that are going to supply what the monarchs need in order to reproduce and keep their population strong," said Mizejewski.
Mizejewski encourages homeowners and developers to plant milkweed and other nectar plants. He said those efforts over the span of several decades can help stabilize the population of butterflies.
"A developer can do this, a homeowner can do this and we’re hoping really to inspire everybody out there to just do that one little thing, plant the native plants particularly the milkweed, don’t spray pesticides over your yard and if we did that we would exponentially increase monarch habitat literally overnight," said Mizejewski.
More information on Monarchs is available here
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