Via Italia Butterfly Festival This Sunday

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Via Italia and the Monarch Enthusiasts of Windsor-Essex, Chatham and Kent County, will be holding the 2nd Annual Butterfly Festival this Sunday, August 28th from 12noon to 4pm at the Community Heritage Garden on Erie Street East between Langlois and Marion Avenues.

During the 2nd Annual Butterfly Festival, there will be vendors offering butterfly related merchandise, as well as lessons on creating, planting, and maintaining butterfly friendly pollinator gardens to easily attract butterflies to your home, how to properly raise, care for, and release butterflies, the monarch butterfly lifecycle and their annual flight to Mexico and why saving butterflies, bees and other pollinators is so important for a healthy ecological system for generations to come.

The festival will also include the release of monarch butterflies into the wild to start their journey south.

Via Italia’s Community Heritage Garden is home to part of the David Suzuki Foundation’s Butterflyway Project which aims to reimagine spaces as part of neighbourhood-wide highways of habitat. The garden is also a registered “monarch waystation” which recognizes the efforts to assure the preservation of the species and the continuation of the spectacular monarch migration phenomenon.

Lead Community Heritage Garden volunteers and hosts of this year’s festival, Leo and Teresa Silvestri, have also founded the Monarch Enthusiasts of Windsor-Essex Facebook group. This group helps to promote the creation of butterfly gardens and habitats by encouraging people to participate however they can in saving the monarchs for future generations.

Sunday’s family-friendly event is free to attend, and the entire block will be closed to traffic so pedestrians can explore, learn, and shop safely and at their leisure. Some monarchs will be tagged to be released at 12:30 pm and 2 pm. Children of all ages may enjoy a monarch on their finger for a few seconds before it flies away to Mexico.