Bicycling with Butterflies by Sara Dykman Review: A 10,201-Mile Ride for Monarch Conservation

The premise needs no embellishment: from March to December 2017, Sara Dykman became the first person to bicycle alongside the monarch butterfly migration, following the insects from their overwintering grounds in central Mexico north to Canada and back again — a round trip of 10,201 miles across three countries. The book, subtitled My 10,201-Mile Journey Following the Monarch Migration, is her account of that solo ride, published by Timber Press (this paperback edition dated February 2023). It is the written record of what she calls "butterbiking," her fourth adventure under an educational project she runs called Beyond a Book. The migration itself provides the narrative architecture — the monarchs' multi-generational relay north and the single "super generation's" return south give the journey a built-in dramatic shape that most improvised long-distance bike trips lack, and the fact that no one had ever attempted to trace it by bicycle makes the feat a documented first rather than a marketing flourish.

What distinguishes the book from a standard adventure diary is how much monarch biology and ecology it carries. Dykman uses the ride as a spine for explaining the migration's mechanics: the role of milkweed as the sole food source of the monarch caterpillar, the citizen-science tagging programs that have tracked individual butterflies, and the network of pollinator "way stations" gardeners have planted along the flyway. A write-up from the Dyck Arboretum's Nature Book Club, which read the book, highlights its treatment of the tallgrass prairie's collapse — noting the book's point that only about 1 percent of the historic prairie remains — and its emphasis on the interconnectedness of living systems and the consequences of human choices. Publisher copy describes science, nature, and adventure woven into a single account, and the source material bears that out: this is a nature book that happens to be told from a bicycle saddle, not a cycling book with butterflies as decoration.

Readers should know what they are signing up for tonally: this is advocacy-forward writing. Dykman did not simply ride the route — during the trip she visited more than 50 schools and nature centers, presenting to over 9,000 students with the message that anyone can be a scientist, conservationist, and adventurer, and the book extends that mission to the page. It urges readers to plant milkweed, support pollinator habitat, and treat the monarch's decline as a shared responsibility. The Dyck Arboretum review singles out her argument for traveling at bicycle speed — that moving slowly reveals a living world that highway velocity renders invisible — as one of the book's most poignant threads. For readers who want their nature writing to double as a call to action, this is the book's engine. For those after a detached, purely observational travelogue, the persistence of the message may feel insistent; the conservation argument is not a subplot here but the point of the whole enterprise.

The strongest external validation is concrete: the book won a 2021 National Outdoor Book Award in outdoor literature, one of the most established prizes in the genre. It also carries an endorsement from Dr. Jane Goodall, who calls the monarch migration "one of the wonders of the world" and urges that it be saved for future generations, and jacket praise describes Dykman telling her story "with both humor and humility." Its adoption by reading groups like the Dyck Arboretum's Nature Book Club points to a second life beyond the adventure shelf — it functions well as a discussion book for environmental and community reading programs. Note that this review draws on the published record around the book — its synopsis, award history, endorsements, and reader commentary — rather than a hands-on evaluation.

This is an easy recommendation for several distinct audiences: cyclists and thru-adventure readers who want a long-haul journey with an unusual purpose; butterfly and pollinator enthusiasts, who will find the migration rendered at human scale; educators and book clubs, given its built-in outreach pedigree; and gardeners already planting milkweed who want the larger story their patch connects to. Its single-species focus is a depth-over-breadth proposition — readers seeking wide-ranging natural history across many ecosystems will find the lens deliberately narrow, fixed on one insect and the human systems around it. But that focus is also the achievement. By the end of 10,201 miles, the monarch is no longer a symbol pasted onto a bike trip; it is the reason the trip coheres, and the book's argument — that individual action connects to a hemispheric phenomenon — is carried by the structure of the ride itself.