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First annual Butterfly Festival comes to Erie Street garden

A pair of monarch butterflies, hatched just hours earlier, feed on a flower at ButterflyWorkx butterfly farm in Dunnellon, Fla., on Friday, June 12, 2015. (Matthew Beck / The Citris County Chronicle) A pair of monarch butterflies, hatched just hours earlier, feed on a flower at ButterflyWorkx butterfly farm in Dunnellon, Fla., on Friday, June 12, 2015. (Matthew Beck / The Citris County Chronicle)
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Windsor, Ont. -

Monarch butterflies will be released into the wild on Sunday to get started on their flight south for the winter at the first annual Butterfly Festival in Windsor’s Via Italia neighbourhood.

The Via Italia BIA and the Monarch Enthusiasts of Windsor-Essex will host the first festival on Sunday from 12 p.m. to 6 p.m. at the Community Heritage Garden on Erie Street. Visitors can check out vendors with butterfly related merchandise and learn more about the winged creatures.

The festival will include the release of monarch butterflies as well as lessons on:

  • Creating, planting, and maintaining butterfly friendly pollinator gardens to easily attract butterflies to your home.
  • How to properly raise, care for, and release butterflies.
  • The monarch butterfly lifecycle and their annual flight to Mexico
  • Why saving butterflies, bees and other pollinators is so important for a healthy ecological system for generations to come.

The Community Heritage Garden is home to part of the David Suzuki Foundation’s Butterflyway Project which aims to make neighbourhood spaces “highways of habitat.”

The garden is also a registered “monarch waystation” which recognizes efforts to preservation efforts when it comes to the butterflies and the continuation of the monarch migration spectacle.

The Butterfly Festival is free to attend and the entire block will be closed to traffic so pedestrians can explore the festival.

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