A small crowd gathered in the pavilion at Blue Heron Park in Phoenix, Oregon, to witness monarch butterflies on their maiden flights.
Kids circled around a vase of colorful flowers as David James, an entomologist at Washington State University, plucked a butterfly from a cardboard box and placed it on a bloom.
“You can see the tag, right?” James said, pointing out a solar panel the size of a grain of rice affixed to the monarch’s thorax. An antenna ran the length of the abdomen…