When most of us close your eyes and picture a “classic” summer scene, we see sunlight, kids running through fields of wildflowers, and…butterflies.

Unfortunately, we’ve seen fewer and fewer Monarch butterflies in the area recently, despite it being the state insect.

Ann Holtrop from the Illinois Department of Natural Resources and Monarch expert Dr. Doug Taron of the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum talk about the importance of the butterfly to our ecosystems and what the state can do to try to bring the species’ numbers back up.