Just outside a Washington women’s prison, endangered butterflies are being raised one by one on greenhouse tables.
The work is part of the Sustainability in Prisons Project, which is helping bring back the Taylor’s checkerspot butterfly, a species that has lost 97 percent of its native prairie-oak habitat to development, agriculture and invasive species.
Kelli Bush, SPP’s co-director, described captive rearing as a “last resort.”
Without large-scale habitat restoration, the butterfly cannot sustain itself in the wild, and without the prison program, it might already have gone extinct.
Margaret Taggart began training as a butterfly technician at the low-security Mission Creek Corrections Center for Women in January 2025. She applied, spoke with a panel and was selected for the role.
“I got the job,” she said. “And it felt like something real.”
Taggart said she had long loved butterflies, nature and plants, but had not known butterflies could be endangered.
“The education was eye-opening,” she said.
Each butterfly is raised individually on its own host plant, usually a plantain, and a nectar plant to prevent disease and preserve genetic diversity. The women track egg clusters so family lines are not mixed, and log growth rates, mortality and environmental conditions.
“I make sure that she’s eating and drinking, that her plant is well maintained,” Taggart said. “I monitor her eggs every single day.”
For Taggart, the work has become deeply personal.
“To be able to nurture something, to take care of a creature that emerges as this beautiful butterfly, that’s just so fulfilling,” she said. “You watch them from the moment they’re born; it feels like you know them.”
Since its early years, the program has helped raise and release 80,000 caterpillars into restored prairie habitats.
Bush said the program also gives incarcerated women education and engagement that is rarely available in prison.
“When people have access to education, they’re 43 percent less likely to recidivate,” Bush said. “And connection to nature improves health and well-being.”
Every prison in Washington state has an SPP program, including beekeeping, native gardening, and raising endangered Northwestern pond turtles or Oregon spotted frogs.
Bush said Taylor’s checkerspot was a good fit because it was imperiled and conservation partners understood the program was an education and training model, not cheap labor.
Every spring, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service conservationists bring wild female butterflies, already carrying eggs, into the greenhouses. The women place them on host plants under controlled conditions of about 16 degrees Celsius and 50 percent humidity.
When the eggs hatch, the larvae are raised through multiple growth phases. As food plants die back, the caterpillars enter diapause and spend winter dormant before resuming feeding in late winter.
The program includes coursework through The Evergreen State College, allowing participants to earn college credits in ecology and animal husbandry.
Taggart said she has completed coursework in ecology and lab hours in animal husbandry, and is considering an associate degree after her release in 11 months.
Before her three-year prison sentence for selling drugs, she worked in automotive service. Now she sees a future tied to environmental work.
“The education portion of this program has really stirred me up to want to learn more and to pursue a degree, which is something I haven’t done before,” Taggart said. “It gave me a belief in myself that I can learn and grow.”
The technicians also take part in the yearly conservation conference at Evergreen and go on excursions to watch larvae being released in native habitats. Some present findings, help develop protocols and engage with conservation professionals as peers.
One of the first butterfly technicians at Mission Creek in 2011, Carolina Landa, later earned a master’s degree in public administration and now works as an analyst in the state legislature.
The butterfly program began in 2011 with painted lady butterflies as a trial. By 2012, it had expanded to Taylor’s checkerspot, building on earlier captive-breeding efforts by conservation partners including the Oregon Zoo.
SPP says 37 states and multiple countries have consulted on how to replicate the model.
The program is now in transition after the closure of the Mission Creek facility. Taggart and the other technicians are bused to the former site while new infrastructure is developed at the Washington Corrections Center for Women in Pierce County, where Taggart now lives.
At WCCW, four incarcerated women have been tending to a native plant conservation nursery. They will join the eight technicians from Mission Creek to form a new conservation team.
“This program has changed a lot of people’s lives,” Taggart said. “It has impacted me in a way that I couldn’t even imagine.”
Read more from Reasons to be Cheerful.
