The Monarchs Cross Magnolia's Latitude Between October 4 and 16. The Plant Sale That Feeds Them Is on the 10th.

The equinox is at 7:05 p.m. Tuesday, which makes this the first day of fall on the calendar. On the ground the season has a different marker, and it flies. The monarchs that hatched in the upper Midwest in August are the generation built for distance, and they are heading for a handful of mountainsides in central Mexico by way of Texas.

When they pass here is not a guess. Monarch Watch, the University of Kansas program that has tagged migrating monarchs since 1992, publishes a table of peak passage by latitude. Magnolia sits at about 30.2 degrees north. For 30 degrees the table gives a midpoint of October 12 and a peak window of October 4 through 16. A yard on Nichols Sawmill Road that sees none this week and several in two weeks is not imagining it.

The state's own map explains why the numbers here are thinner than the ones people report from the Hill Country. Texas Parks and Wildlife describes two fall flyways. The main one is 300 miles wide and runs from Wichita Falls to Eagle Pass, well west of us; monarchs enter it in the last days of September and most are into Mexico by early November. The second runs along the coast from roughly the third week of October to the middle of November. Montgomery County sits between the two. What reaches a yard here is what drifts off the edges of both.

The count that matters most is taken in December, on the wintering grounds. The World Wildlife Fund and Mexico's protected-areas commission measure how much oyamel fir forest the clustered butterflies cover. For the winter of 2025-26 the answer, announced in March, was 2.93 hectares, about 7.2 acres, in nine colonies. That is 64 percent more than the 1.79 hectares of the winter before. Researchers who work on the population put the long-term floor for a stable migration at about six hectares, so the good year is still a small one. The National Wildlife Federation's senior scientist on the count, Rebeca Quiñonez-Piñón, called the increase welcome news against a long-term trend that is still down.

In Washington the paperwork is stalled. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed listing the monarch as threatened under the Endangered Species Act in December 2024, with exceptions written in for routine land use. Public comment closed in March 2025. The final decision was due December 12, 2025, and did not come; the agency's most recent regulatory agenda moved it to the long-term list, and conservation groups sued in the spring over the missed deadline. As of this week the butterfly is still proposed, not listed. Nothing in that changes what a homeowner may plant.

What to plant is the part with a local date on it. Fall monarchs are not laying eggs; they are fueling. They want nectar, and the plants that carry it in October around here are Gregg's mistflower, fall aster, goldenrod, lantana and the fall-blooming salvias, all on the list the horticulturist Neil Sperry published last week. Milkweed is the spring plant, the one the caterpillars eat; the two natives he names for this part of the state are butterfly weed and green milkweed, and Texas Parks and Wildlife counts more than 35 native milkweed species statewide.

One caution comes with a date. Tropical milkweed, the red-and-yellow one most garden centers sell, does not die back in a mild Gulf Coast fall. A monarch that finds it blooming in October may stop, lay eggs and stay, and the ones that stay through a Texas winter tend not to survive it; a parasite that builds up on the plant does better in the cool months too. Sperry's instruction, echoed by Mike Arnold, who directs The Gardens at Texas A&M, is to cut tropical milkweed back to about six inches by early October and throw the clippings away rather than compost them. Native milkweeds can be left alone.

The Montgomery County Master Gardeners hold their fall plant sale on Saturday, October 10, from 9 a.m. to noon at the Texas A&M AgriLife Extension office, 9020 Airport Road in Conroe. It falls two days before the table's midpoint. The association's events page sends shoppers to its online store for the plant list. A week earlier, on Saturday, October 3, the same group runs a $30 symposium called New Homeowner Landscape Basics, built for people planting a yard in a new subdivision for the first time; it runs 9 to 2 with lunch, is capped at 50 seats and takes registration through the association's calendar. The help desk is 936-539-7824, weekdays.

Anyone who sees a monarch can log it. Journey North collects first-sighting reports by date and ZIP code, and Texas Parks and Wildlife's Nature Trackers program asks for milkweed and monarch photos on its iNaturalist project. Both are free, and observations like them are how a table that says October 4 through 16 gets written in the first place.