Morris, a Chandler resident, took time off from her administrative job about four years ago looking for a "change of pace."

"I thought I was going to go back to my job but I started getting back into the nature of things," Morris said.

Morris worked as a docent at the Desert Botanical Garden before volunteering at Southwest Monarch Study. The organization studies monarch butterfly migration patterns in Arizona.

She still volunteers for the organization, and also works as a trainer for the Monarch Larva Monitoring Project, a national program that monitors breeding grounds.

Little is known about the butterflies' migration pattern in the West, which is why it's important to study them, said Dr. Orley "Chip" Taylor, a professor at the University of Kansas and director of Monarch Watch, an educational program based at the university.

Taylor said it's important to know where the western populations spend the winter. "We pretty much know this for the eastern monarchs, but the western monarchs are really not very well studied."

Some of them go to Mexico while others go to the California coast – something they learned during the tagging program, he said.

Taylor said that western populations are extremely low and declining because of habitat loss – milkweed in particular, droughts and warming climates. "There's lots of evidence that high temperatures and dry conditions have a very negative
impact on the reproduction of these butterflies," he said.

The monarchs' populations have hit a low point this past winter, and Monarch Watch aims to track the population, Morris said, who collects data for the Southwest Monarch Study and for a national databank. Morris said she travels throughout southern and central Arizona as often as she can and sometimes brings her husband, students and friends with her.

"I not only do monarch tagging, I push education and encourage
everyone to plant more milkweed," she said.

Scottsdale resident and butterfly enthusiast Laura Miller met Morris about a year ago at a Central Arizona Butterfly Association meeting.

"I mentioned I had a monarch in my yard the spring before, and Gail tapped me on the shoulder," she said. "Two days later, I called her and we tagged a couple in my yard."

How do you tag a butterfly?

Fully equipped in her white T-shirt, khaki pants, boots, hat and sunglasses, complete with butterfly stud earrings and a fanny pack, Morris and Miller set off on the hunt for monarchs on a sunny Friday morning.

Blue and white soft-mesh butterfly net in hand, Morris easily moves through the thigh-high grass on the side of a road in Canelo while explaining that this area of wildflowers and willow trees has one of the richest ecosystems for monarchs in the state.

After about 15 minutes of walking, Morris spots her first monarch and waits for the female butterfly to lay her eggs on a milkweed plant before catching it in a net.

"I never want to interrupt a female laying eggs," she said. "That's too important. We have to make sure that our zeal for tagging doesn't interrupt their life cycle."

Morris waits for the butterfly to stop flapping its wings before carefully taking it out of the net and holding it by its wings between her index finger and thumb.

"They are delicate and you don't want to hurt them," she said. "But the other part of it is that some of these guys have flown 3,000 miles in their migration, so they're not as delicate as we think."

Morris takes out a blue, round sticker small enough to fit on her index fingernail with a tracking number and the Southwest Monarch Study's e-mail address written in black. She gently places it on the monarch's wing.

"You want to put the tag in this little mitten-shaped cell, called the discal cell," she said.

After snapping a few photos of the butterfly with the tag in view, Morris releases it.

Morris spends a couple of hours tagging about 10 butterflies that day and said the number of monarchs they tag in a day varies.

Morris said she plans to continue tagging butterflies for as long as she can.

"It's all a love affair," she said.