The Amazing Monarch: The Secret Windering Grounds of an Endangered Butterfly

In The Amazing Monarch, author and photographer Windle Turley chronicles the lifecycle of the monarch butterfly. Replete with page after page of full-color photographs, the book shows the monarch’s rarely captured wintering grounds. The contrast of the orange and black pops off the page as the reader goes on a visual tour in the high mountains of Mexico. The multifaceted work also contains poems and quotations focusing on the beauty of these tiny animals that weigh only.02 of an ounce. The Amazing Monarch tracks the monarch’s migration and interesting life span. The handful of roosting sites, located at an altitude of about 10,000 feet and only a few acres in size, may each contain 20 to 30 million monarchs. Granted almost unprecedented access by Mexican wildlife officials, Turley photographed the insects in their natural habitats at their sanctuaries in Los Saucos and at the Sierra Chincua Sanctuary—areas unknown to outsiders until 1975.