A free sample of the Austin edition

How to Get Monarchs to Breed in Your Austin Yard is a field guide for a parent or grandparent in the Austin area with a child of about four to ten, a bit of ground or a few big pots, and no gardening experience. It has nine sections, a safety chapter called Gentle Hands, and a printable observation journal for the child. Every plant in it carries two institutional sources, and every date carries the weather station or sighting record it came from.

Below is section 3, complete, as it appears in the guide. Each section opens with a few lines for a grown-up to read aloud to a child, then the grown-up text, with its sources. If you read only one section, this is the one: it explains the two visits monarchs make to Austin each year and what each one asks of a yard.

3 · Your two windows

Read aloud In spring, monarch mothers come through Austin looking for baby milkweed plants to lay their eggs on. That is when we might find eggs and caterpillars in our yard. In fall, monarchs flying to Mexico stop here for a drink. Most of them are on the long trip south, and they are not laying eggs right now. So spring is for milkweed, and fall is for flowers.

Window one: spring, the egg season

About mid-March to about mid-April. Have milkweed up and green by early March.

Texas Parks and Wildlife: “Early each March overwintering monarchs begin arriving from their overwintering grounds in Mexico. Seeking emerging milkweeds, they move through Texas laying eggs before dying.”¹ Monarch Watch puts their departure from Mexico in “the second week of March.”²

The nearest dated egg record to Austin that we could find is three eggs at Driftwood, Texas (Hays County), on 12 March 2025, reported to Journey North by Chuck Patterson.³ Five days later an observer at Glen Rose reported eggs “on small antelope horn milkweed sprouts.”³ Those are single observations, not averages, but they land where the agencies say they should.

The egg season fades as the first generation of the year, raised on milkweed across Texas and the southern states, heads north; Monarch Joint Venture puts that “in approximately late April through May.”⁴ Sightings that people have logged on iNaturalist for Travis County show adult monarchs present in a long, gentle plateau from about 12 March to about 6 May, with no sharp peak.⁵

The one thing this asks of you: milkweed that is already up in early March. Not planted in March; up in March. Section 6 works backward from that.

Window two: fall, passing through

About the last days of September to about early November, busiest from about 15 October to about 4 November. Have flowers in bloom.

Texas Parks and Wildlife: monarchs “enter the Texas portion of this flyway during the last days of September. By early November, most have passed through into Mexico.”¹ Wizzie Brown, the Texas A&M AgriLife Extension entomology specialist for Travis County, says: “They usually start heading south through Texas around September into November.”⁶

That is a passage of about six weeks, and inside it there are about three busy weeks.¹⁵ In the sightings people logged on iNaturalist for Travis County in 2023, 2024 and 2025, the busiest week fell somewhere between 15 October and 4 November in every one of those years.⁵ That is why this book names three weeks rather than a single date: the peak moves.

What this asks of you: flowers in bloom from late September into November, and somewhere to rest.⁷¹ Section 4 lists the flowers.

Why the two windows make two different promises

The title of this book says “breed.” That is a spring promise. Monarch Joint Venture: “Most monarch butterflies that emerge after about mid August in the eastern U.S. enter reproductive diapause (do not reproduce) and begin to migrate south.”⁴ The Xerces Society says the migrants “generally remain in reproductive diapause until the spring.”⁷

Notice “most” and “generally.” Fall egg-laying is not zero. A study in north Texas found that “fall reproduction is a response to available host plants and its timing enables pupae to eclose in time for migration to winter roosts,” and that monarchs on the study site were most abundant three to four weeks before the main passage.⁸ Journey North’s report of 18 August 2026 listed egg reports “several in Texas”; this guide reads those as the tail of summer breeding rather than fall migrants, because Monarch Joint Venture says most monarchs that emerge after about mid-August are no longer breeding.⁹⁴ And among the sightings people logged on iNaturalist within 40 km of Austin from 2018 to 2025, there were 112 caterpillar records in October against 398 in April.¹⁰

So if you find a caterpillar on your milkweed in October, it is real. The Monarch Larva Monitoring Project adds: “if you are worried, don’t raise monarchs from the final generation that should migrate.”¹¹ And don’t plan the fall garden around it. Its job is fuel and shelter for butterflies that are, for the most part, not laying.⁴⁷

How we know. The spring and fall dates come from Texas Parks and Wildlife and the Travis County extension office. The busiest weeks come from sightings people have logged on iNaturalist for Travis County, 2023 to 2025, retrieved on 23 September 2026; they reflect how many people were out looking as well as how many monarchs were there, and the counts shift a little as people add sightings.¹⁶⁵

The details.

• The end of the egg season. “Mid-April” is a judgement from Monarch Joint Venture’s generation timing and the Travis County plateau, not a dated record.⁴⁵ The busiest single week in the spring sightings is 9 to 15 April, after the March egg-laying; that is plausibly the first Austin-born generation taking wing rather than new arrivals, which is a reading of the timing, not a statement any source made.⁵⁴
• The fall peak, year by year. Across all years combined, the busiest week in the Travis County sightings is 22 to 28 October, and the busiest two consecutive weeks hold only about 37.6% of all fall sightings.⁵ The peak week moved from 15 to 21 October in 2023 to 22 to 28 October in 2024 to 29 October to 4 November in 2025.⁵
• Monarch Watch’s guideline. Monarch Watch’s peak-by-latitude table gives 4 to 16 October for 31 degrees north and 10 to 22 October for 29 degrees, with no row for Austin’s 30; the observed Austin peak runs about a week later than a line drawn between those rows.¹²⁵
• A different fall window you may see quoted. The Xerces Society’s regional nectar guide gives “July through October,” but that guide covers a five-state region whose northern edge is Kansas, where the southbound flight arrives weeks earlier; for Travis County the extension specialist’s dates are the ones to plan by.⁷⁶
• First sightings, year by year. We looked for a dated first spring sighting of a monarch in Travis County for each year from 2022 to 2026, and the answer is the same each year: No record found for 2022; No record found for 2023; No record found for 2024; No record found for 2025; No record found for 2026. Journey North rebuilt its website in early 2026 and not all older sighting tables have been carried over yet, so those records may exist and not yet be reachable.¹³ There is a second reason the question is hard: Travis County has a few monarch sightings even in January (17, 7 and 10 in the first three weeks of January, all years combined), so a “first sighting of the year” can be a straggler rather than an arrival.⁵

What the full guide adds

The other eight sections and the two chapters at the back:

1. Where they come from. The winter forests in Mexico, the spring flight north, and why a caterpillar on Austin milkweed in March is part of the generation, made across Texas and the southern states, that repopulates the eastern range.
2. The map. Where Austin sits on the fall route, in the agency’s words, and what the roost records do and don’t show.
3. The plants. Three native milkweeds with two institutional sources each, two spring flowers, ten fall flowers, the do-nots, and where the bloom months disagree.
4. How to lay it out. Sun, soil, how many plants, where the flowers go, and three plan drawings for a bed, a fence strip and a patio.
5. The dated calendar. Month by month, with the freeze dates from three Austin weather stations and what to do if you are reading it in the wrong month.
6. Egg to butterfly. The four stages with sizes and days, and five illustrated plates.
7. What goes wrong. Nothing came, predators, tachinid flies, the OE parasite, insecticides, aphids, running out of milkweed, and the argument about rearing.
8. A little history. The tags, the winter forests found in 1975, the count done by everyone, and the decline.

• Gentle Hands. Monarch safety for Austin families: five things for grown-ups to know, twelve house rules to read to a child, an age table, Austin’s stinging caterpillars, milkweed sap, and a fridge card with Poison Help’s number.
• The observation journal. Printable, one page a day, with a stage checklist and a ruler on the back. It collects nothing from you or your child.

The plates that identify a living thing are marked “draft, awaiting expert review” until a lepidopterist or horticulturist has checked them, and the guide says so on each one.

The guide is a PDF, $17, one time. The price and the refund promise are on the Austin edition page.