Winged Wonders : Solving the Monarch Migration Mystery. Written by Meeg Pincus. Illustrated by Yas Imamura. Sleeping Bear Press, 2020.
April is Citizen Science Month! Fortunately for me, Kidzu Children’s Museum took the opportunity to highlight Winged Wonders, a delightful and award-winning nonfiction picture book about citizen scientists, in the museum’s Twitter feed. Author Meeg Pincus and illustrator Yas Imamura tell the story of the monarch migration as a mystery solved by citizen scientists working together across the span of a continent. Bright, welcoming, illustrations include hundreds of migrating monarch butterflies, trees exploding with butterflies, and diverse scientists passing the torch from Canada to Mexico by tagging butterflies and mapping the monarch migration route. The book highlights cultural details of the communities where community scientists worked together to solve the migration mystery, such as the arrival of the monarchs coinciding with Día de Muertos celebrations in central Mexico each year. This is one of the few books I’ve found that tells the story of community science in a narrative way: focusing on the people, the places, the history, the science, and the beloved monarch butterfly.
Help save the monarchs with one of these community science opportunities from Monarch Joint Venture. Teachers: reach out to me on Twitter with your monarch community science curriculum ideas for the classroom, and let me know how it goes if you use this lovely book in the classroom.
