Monika Maeckle is a longtime gardener, monarch tagger, recovering beekeeper, and curious student of nature. She’s based in San Antonio.
Her career path has been in media and marketing. She founded the Texas Butterfly Ranch website and San Antonio’s Monarch Butterfly and Pollinator Festival. She and her husband, Robert Rivard, founded San Antonio’s independent news site, the Rivard Report, which later rebranded as the nonprofit San Antonio Report.
Maeckle grows native and well-adapted plants in her urban garden as well as at her family’s Llano River ranch. She, her family, and her friends have tagged more than 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 Mayors’ Monarch Pledge, resulting in the city’s status as the nation’s first Monarch Butterfly Champion City. She also spearheaded a local pollinator habitat initiative in 2018 in an effort to create 300 pollinator habitats for San Antonio’s 300th birthday. The initiative now boasts more than 1,300 registrants.
She hopes to help people overcome their plant blindness by exploring the amazing attributes plants exhibit beyond how they look.
Her first book, The Monarch Butterfly Migration: Its Rise and Fall, was published in August of 2024 by the University of Oklahoma Press. She is joining us at the Book Festival to discuss her second book, Plants with Purpose: Twenty-Five Ecosystem Multitaskers.
