June Meeting 2025

Описание: Presentation by Monica Maeckle
Discussing her new book “Plants with a Purpose”

Monika Maeckle is a gardener, monarch tagger, recovering beekeeper, and curious student of nature who loves the whole life cycle. She’s based in San Antonio.

With a long career in media and marketing, Maeckle founded the Texas Butterfly Ranch website and San Antonio’s Monarch Butterfly and Pollinator Festival. She and husband, Robert Rivard, founded San Antonio’s independent news site, the Rivard Report, which later rebranded as the nonprofit San Antonio Report. She continues to serve as a contributor to the site.

Maeckle raises butterflies and native plants in her Mariposario and urban garden as well as at her family’s Llano River ranch. She, her family and friends have tagged 10,000+ monarch butterflies over the years, more than 60 of which have been recovered from the forest floor in Mexico.

Maeckle worked closely with the National Wildlife Federation in 2015 to convince San Antonio to sign the Mayor’s Monarch Pledge, resulting in the city’ status as the nation’s first Monarch Butterfly Champion City. In 2016, with lots of community help, she organized San Antonio’s Monarch Butterfly and Pollinator Festival, which occur each October during peak monarch migration season, attracting thousands of visitors. Social impact media site Nationswell profiled the event in a 12-minute documentary and named it “Outstanding Solution of 2018.”

Maeckle also spearheaded a local pollinator habitat initiative, in an effort to create 300 pollinator habitats for San Antonio’s 300th birthday. After exceeding its 2018 goal, the initiative expanded beyond San Antonio, and now boasts 1,200+ registrants.

Her first book, The Monarch Butterfly Migration Its Rise and Fall, was published in August of 2024 by the University of Oklahoma Press. Her second book, Plants with Purpose: Twenty-Five Ecosystem Multitaskers, was published in May of 2025 by Texas A & M University Press.