Monarch Watch director Chip Taylor demonstrates how to tag a butterfly during the Monarch Watch open house at Foley Hall, 2021 Constant Ave., on the University of Kansas' west campus on Sept. 12, 2015.

Marian Cashatt has noticed something missing in her Baldwin City flower garden this summer.

“I’m not seeing any butterflies,” she said. “I have a butterfly garden and phlox. Usually, they are all over the phlox.”

Cashatt said she mentioned the butterfly scarcity to her gardening friends.

“They said they weren’t seeing butterflies in their gardens,” she said.

The Baldwin City gardeners were correct in their observations, said Chip Taylor, head of Monarch Watch at the University of Kansas. The state’s butterfly populations are down. He’s not sure of the exact reason, but he’s pretty certain it can be traced to conditions in Texas sometime in the last year.

There are about 150 species of butterflies that flutter about the fields and gardens of Kansas, Taylor said. About 20 of those species migrate from Texas or other southeastern states.

“Many of the most conspicuous ones come in mostly from Texas,” he said. “It’s not clear what, but something occurred with their overwintering conditions. It can be hard to diagnose because it was something that happened six months or more ago.”

Taylor, who is currently in Alaska, said he noticed smaller than normal butterflies late in the spring during their annual migration north. It fits in a recorded pattern of recent fluctuations in butterfly populations.

In 2011, Texas suffered through a long drought that dried up lakes and left hills gray with dead trees, Taylor said. Butterfly populations fell, but so did those of fire ants and other predators. The drought was followed by seven months of more than normal rainfall, starting in September 2011 and continuing through March 2012. Taylor said vegetation thrived with the rain, and butterfly populations bounced back before fire ants and other predator populations recovered.

The result was an explosion of butterfly populations, and the number of butterflies and diversity of species that migrated to Kansas and other northern locales in 2012 were much greater than normal, Taylor said. One species, the red admiral, was noted in large numbers that year as far north as Canada.

Taylor said he expected butterfly populations to noticeably increase in late summer. The butterflies that migrate to the area continue to breed in the state, producing new generations of insects throughout the season.

“Populations are highest in the last generation in September,” he said. “If we don’t see a lot in September, we really are having a bad year.”