You Can Help the Monarch Butterflies in Hamilton-Wenham

Have you spotted the Hamilton-Wenham Public Library’s royal guests?

The Children’s Room at the library is home to a number of monarch butterflies at multiple stages of their life cycle, from caterpillar to chrysalis to butterfly.

The library has been raising butterflies each season for about 15 years, according to Children’s Librarian Lorraine Der. Each year, she explained, the library receives a new crop of caterpillar eggs that hatch into caterpillars that then grow up at the library, eventually forming chrysalises and emerging as monarch butterflies. At that point, the library releases them to the wild.

Currently, you can stop by the library and guess how many butterflies the library will release this year as there are still multiple caterpillars as well as chrysalis in the enclosure and its unknown how many butterflies will emerge from this year’s crop.

As part of the raising process, Der said she feeds the caterpillars milkweed and now she has the seedpods left over. Der said she has a few dozen seed pods, and she invited anyone who wants one to stop by the library and pick one up to plant in their own garden in hopes of attracting and helping the monarch population.

Former Hamilton resident and current Boston College professor Charlie Hoffman returns to the library each summer to give a talk about saving the butterflies, which are in decline in the wild, Der said. Hoffman teaches children and adults how to identify, collect and care for monarch eggs and caterpillars, raising them at home until they reach the butterfly stage.

Editor’s note: Dr. Hoffman is a professor at Boston College, not Boston University as originally written. The above has been corrected and we apologize for the error.