Last Friday, Marisa Pitzen and her mother, Dawn Pitzen, held a presentation on monarch tagging at Southern Door School. Marisa is a middle schooler at Southern Door and has been working on tagging monarch butterflies over the past three years with the University of Kansas. This 2019 Marisa was officially titled a citizen scientist. 
Marisa and her mother brought ten monarch butterflies to Southern Door to give her classmates a real-life tagging demonstration. Afterward, they brought the monarchs outside, with Marisa’s fifth-grade class in pursuit, to free them tagged and ready for milkweed. 
During the presentation, Marisa and her mother shared that they are not the only ones who can help out monarch butterflies. If you see one tagged, you can take a picture of its wing and upload the code you see on the sticker to help track those butterflies. Marisa encourages others to grow milkweed to support these gentle creatures.