Do you remember the summer you tried to catch a butterfly?
Bare feet in warm grass. A jar with holes poked in the lid, or maybe just two cupped hands. You crept up slowly, holding your breath, and just as you reached out, it lifted off and floated away over the fence, as if it had somewhere very important to be.
It turns out some of them really do.
A butterfly that phones home
This fall, researchers at Virginia Tech's Conservation Management Institute have been following monarch butterflies on their long migration from Virginia toward Mexico. As Virginia Tech News reported on October 22, the team fitted 35 monarchs with tiny tags that weigh less than half a gram.
Here's the delightful part. Each tag sends out a little pulse that Bluetooth devices can pick up. When a butterfly passes a smartphone, a car, or a cell tower that detects it, the signal quietly passes along the tag's number and location in the background. Check-in by check-in, those signals build a live map of each butterfly's journey.
So people simply going about their day, phone in pocket, may be helping scientists follow a butterfly without ever knowing it. Researcher Jennifer Weber called it "citizen science, but crowd-powered."
Thomas, the real traveler
Weber gave some of the monarchs names, and one of them, Thomas, has quite a story.
Thomas was tagged at Fort A.P. Hill in Virginia and was last detected in Mississippi. The team expected him to follow the Gulf Coast toward the monarchs' wintering grounds. Instead, a swirling storm system picked him up and carried him all the way across the Gulf. When he pinged again, he was about a thousand miles away, in southern Mexico.
Knocked off course, and still flying.
There's something about that little traveler that's hard to forget. He didn't take the route anyone planned for him. A storm he never chose set him down somewhere unexpected, and he simply kept going.
Most of us know that feeling. Plans change. Storms blow through. We land somewhere we never meant to be. And very often, the bravest thing we can do is open our wings and keep flying.
The butterflies we never caught
Maybe that's why chasing butterflies is such a happy memory for so many of us. We almost never caught one, and somehow that was never the point. The point was the chase: the running, the laughing, the grass stains, and the feeling that something beautiful was always just a little bit ahead of us.
That's not a bad way to think about dreams, either. Some we catch. Some we keep chasing. And some carry us somewhere we never expected to go.
Share the wonder
If there's a child in your life, tell them about Thomas. Find Virginia and Mexico on a map and trace his trip together with your finger. Then ask: "If you could fly anywhere, like a butterfly, where would you go?"
If you have a garden, milkweed, goldenrod, thistle, and wingstem are a few of the plants monarchs need, and Weber says a wide variety that feeds them through every part of the year is what matters most. A few of those can become a little rest stop for the next traveler passing through.
Your turn
So, when did you last chase a butterfly? Where were you, and who was running beside you? We'd genuinely love to hear your favorite butterfly memory.
And the next time a monarch drifts past, give it a little wave. It might be on its way somewhere far away, and still flying.
Source: Virginia Tech News, "Monarchs report their locations via… cell phone?" by Chris Moody, October 22, 2026.
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