This morning I was on the Fargo City website after signing up both of the boys to play hockey this fall when I noticed a butterfly tagging event on the city calendar. I sent the link to Danny and told him we should try it out. It was a free event where the city was asking help from the community in catching butterflies to tag them before they all migrate. It sounded right up our alley. So after we had a quick dinner we all got in the car and headed to the park this event was taking place. The kids were all given a net to use and then they had one big net for the family but we brought Danny's from home and didn't need theirs. I'm not sure if they were anticipating the wind but I think because of how windy it was people weren't having much luck in catching the monarchs. We didn't get to the place until 6pm and it had started at 5pm but at that point I had overheard that they had only gotten twelve total. We only had an hour before they packed up at 7pm but even just walking through the prairie grass felt nice. The breeze might have been bad for the butterflies but it felt great for us. Hudson caught grasshoppers and of course Addie and Danny caught dragonflies. After an hour we returned the nets the kids were using and went on to play on the three playground areas this park had. The kids were in heaven. While the kids were on the slide I noticed that Danny had caught something with his personal net. I knew it was a butterfly by the look of his face so I told all the kids to run with us because the people had already packed up but were still there and we wanted to catch them before they completely left. We got there just in time for the last butterfly to be tagged at 7:05pm. We were all excited. The people were happy another one was caught (this one made it so they had 17 total tagged) and we were excited to watch this process happen. I wasn't sure what I was picturing when I was thinking of butterflies being tagged but it's basically a tracking sticker placed carefully on the wing. We gave Grant the honors of releasing it back to the wild. After we released the butterfly and said goodbye to the event hosts we went back to the playground areas where the kids all played until bedtime. It was a good night.
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