On October 6, I went with some members of
Stockton’s Animal Friendly Organization to volunteer at the Wetlands Institute
in Stone Harbor. The reason for our volunteering there was the Wetlands
Institute was having its Monarch Madness program; a children’s program they set
up every year around the time the monarch butterflies migration path from
Canada to Mexico reaches southern New Jersey. We arrived around ten in the
morning, where we were first taken to the children’s activities tables.  They had various arts and crafts tables set
up where children could color pictures, tie-dye, and make paper butterflies and
a table with butterfly bingo. We switched off working at the tables for about
three hours, but I did the butterfly bingo most of the time. The kids would get
a bingo card that had pictures of various butterfly species and they would put
a chip on the picture if it was called. My job was to be the bingo caller; I
would draw a card from a deck and call out what butterfly species appeared,
sometimes having to help out the kids find the picture on their card. At one in
the afternoon, we stopped working the tables to help with the diamond-back
terrapin release. An employee of the institute took us into the back and we were
given a bucket of turtles and we went down a nature trail with her and a group
of visitors to a boat dock. There, the kids were able to let the terrapins go
into the water. After watching about five terrapins swim away, we walked back
to the institute to continue helping by aiding in a monarch butterfly release.
There was a monarch butterfly expert there and she let us place identification
tags on a few butterflies and let them go. This was the last thing we did for
Monarch Madness, finally leaving around two. Volunteering at Monarch Madness
with the Animal Friendly Organization was an enriching experience for me. Even
though volunteering there was currently a onetime activity, I would definitely
consider volunteering at the Wetlands Institute at some time in the future.