Carnegie celebrates, promotes monarch butterflies at annual festival

Gina James, president of Carnegie’s Shade Tree Commission, says she can see the difference over five years in her community’s efforts to preserve and protect monarch butterflies.

“Everybody has come up and said, they’re seeing more monarchs,” James said. “We’re bringing more monarchs to Carnegie, and everyone seems to love it.”

Carnegie held its fifth-annual Monarch Butterfly Festival off East Main Street on Aug. 24.

At the event, shade tree commission members Gina and Chris James and Bill Moldovan handed out native nectars, milkweed, watering cans and bulbs; commission members Alicia and Nate Kesneck ran an arts and crafts station, and Carnegie Elementary PTA members Laura Lenk and Becky Watkins did face painting.

The milkweed plants were grown by H3art Farms, and the native nectars were grown by Bednar Farms.

Character artist Mary Grace Nichol played a “Monarch Princess,” spoke with children and posed for pictures. Musicians Paz and Ukulele Eddie played music, local business Woolly Bear Books and Gifts brought monarch-themed books, and the library brought event flyers.

Mayor Stacie Riley declared Aug. 24 as “Mayor’s Monarch Pledge Day” in the borough. She said that, for the past three years, Carnegie was named a “Monarch Champion” by the National Wildlife Foundation and is on track to receive the distinction again this year.

Action items to become a “Monarch Champion” include awareness and educational campaigns, and plantings that support monarch butterflies.

“When you get community collaboration and see the event grow, that’s what’s most rewarding,” Riley said of the festival.

The iconic butterfly has seen its struggles over the years.

Twenty-five years ago, more than one billion eastern Monarch butterflies migrated to Mexico, but in the winter of 2014, only 60 million did, according to Carnegie’s proclamation. But those numbers have improved: this year, the eastern monarch butterfly population nearly doubled in 2025, according to the World Wildlife Fund.

Monarchs are important, Gina James said, because they’re pollinators. Pollinators, which also include bees, butterflies, hummingbirds and beetles, help 75% of flowering plants reproduce, 35% of the world’s food production and maintain biodiversity and healthy ecosystems.

“It’s better for the environment and better for us,” she said.

To Riley, the monarch has an additional meaning: the butterflies remind her of her late father, Michael, who died in 2011.

“I always say, I get my sense of pride of Carnegie from him,” she said.