It Took 20,000 Shots to Capture This Extraordinary Moment in Nature

After two decades following monarch butterflies across North America, Nat Geo photographer Jaime Rojo shares the remarkable stories behind his images—and the fleeting moments he spent years trying to capture.

An upward shot of monarch butterflies flying in a forest against blue sky
In Monarchs, photographer Jaime Rojo brings together two decades of stunning images documenting one of nature’s most extraordinary migrations, from the forests of Mexico to the fields of North America, revealing the beauty, chaos, and wonder of these remarkable butterflies.
ByAlexa Robles-Gil
Photographs byJaime Rojo
Published October 16, 2026

In February 2004, Jaime Rojo, a young Spanish photographer, was walking uphill in Sierra Chincua, a forested mountain range in Mexico that doubles as a sanctuary for the tens of millions of monarch butterflies that migrate there each winter. As he climbed with the friends who had brought him, he began to spot monarchs along the path. Only a few at first. But the higher he went, the more he heard a sound in the background, like something whispering in the trees. Suddenly, a swarm of butterflies was flying overhead, millions of orange and black wings fluttering against the blue sky beyond. “There were so many that you could feel a slight breeze when they flew over you,” he says.

He was only meant to be in Mexico for six months. But that visit to the sanctuary set off a journey that would span half his life and follow the butterflies across a continent. In Monarchs, a new visual book, Rojo brings together photographs from those two decades of work. “Monarch butterflies are a very chaotic spectacle,” he says, and he has tried to distill that mesmerizing chaos through his photography.

Capturing that chaos was rarely straightforward. One photograph, taken at El Rosario Sanctuary in Mexico, took some 20,000 attempts. Rojo wanted to capture the butterflies in flight, with both the deep green oyamel fir forest and the blue sky as a backdrop. But standing in the middle of a swarm brought its own challenges. “They fell on top of me,” he says. “They were tangled in my hair, and on my face. They were on the lens.”

To Rojo, this photo, seen above, best represents the monarchs’ spirit: their stunning colors, patterns, form, and sheer numbers, set against the deep fir forests and the blue sky beyond. They’re beautiful when they fly with only the sky or the forest as their backdrop. But both? “That is the best of all worlds,” he says.

Even after two decades, the butterflies still surprise him. On a cloudy day in the forests of Mexico, when the sun breaks through, the butterflies begin to warm up. Then, just as the next cloud is about to move in, “there is an explosion of butterflies,” he says. “I can't explain why. Nobody really knows.” Waiting for those rare, chaotic moments is how he captured his best shots.. Read on for the stories behind some of the collection's most memorable images.

A close up of a Monarch Butterfly caterpillar on a bright green milkweed plant
Documenting the monarchs meant following their migration from Canada to Mexico. Rojo had plenty of caterpillar photos, but he wanted one that showed the insect with milkweed, the main plant it feeds on. Six weeks into an assignment, he still hadn't found a single caterpillar. When his daughters came to visit him in Minnesota, he gave them a mission: “Find a fat caterpillar.” After a day of searching, they found one under a milkweed leaf at the edge of a cornfield. “It was idyllic,” he says.
Rojo was delighted with the end result. The photo, with cornstalks behind the caterpillar, shows how farmland has pushed out milkweed. And the dark blue sky, glimpsed only after the sun has set, gives the photo “a really dramatic look.”
A close-up of a monarch butterfly resting on a purple thistle with cows in the background
Much of Rojo's work has also been about the people whose lives intertwine with those of the monarchs. In Wisconsin, he met a PhD student studying how cattle grazing affects monarchs. Rojo wondered how he could “represent such an abstract piece of research” through photography. Undeterred, he followed the graduate student around until they found a spot where she released a butterfly in front of some cattle. For Rojo, it satisfied his three requirements for a photo: it should be beautiful, stir some emotion in the viewer, and tell a story. “This one does all three,” he says.
Monarch butterflies flying in all different directions in a forest.
At El Rosario Sanctuary in Mexico, where Rojo has taken some of his most stunning photographs, monarchs sometimes grow restless in the midday heat. Hundreds drop to the ground beside a small stream in a behavior known as puddling, drinking from the wet soil to take in moisture and vital minerals. They are hypersensitive to movement, so if a person gets close while they are drinking, they all take off at once. Rojo saw a chance to pull viewers into what happens next: “You’re enveloped by a cloud of butterflies.”
A macro shot of a monarch butterfly's wing
Over the years, Rojo explored many ways of photographing butterflies, but he often avoided close-ups. “I’m very bad at macro,” he says. He has only a few macro images in his entire archive. One day, while visiting Piedra Herrada Sanctuary in Mexico with a friend, he got bored and started playing around with the technique. What he liked most about this image was the way the light, hitting at just the right angle, captured the translucence of the monarch’s wings, casting a dark line where one wing overlapped the other.
Two monarchs fly near each other next to a tree trunk covered in other monarch butterflies in dramatic lighting
Over twenty years with the monarchs, Rojo found himself endlessly chasing the same ideas for shots, waiting for the perfect moment to capture them. One of those ideas was a dark background, butterflies in flight, and a single streak of light filtering through the oyamel fir canopy to settle on one patch of butterflies. “That little ray of sunlight moves a tiny bit every minute,” he says. Rojo often spent hours following a single streak of light through the forest, trying to capture one of those fleeting scenes. With this one, he knew he had it.
Golden sunlight streams through a forest of trees covered in monarch butterflies
Good sunsets are rare in the thick oyamel fir forests where the monarchs overwinter, since the mountainous terrain and clouds on the horizon block the light. One December afternoon, Rojo had a permit to work outside El Rosario Sanctuary's operating hours. Many visitors had come through that day, and the dust they kicked up still hung in the air. The sun dropped between the fir trees, where the monarchs were roosting so thickly they weighed down the brancclustered together for warmthhes. The dust caught the light and broke it into streaks. Rojo found his spot and set up his tripod. “The sun sank one millimeter more, and suddenly its rays flooded the entire forest clearing,” Rojo says. In all his years at the sanctuary, “I've only seen the sunset two times,” he adds.
Alexa Robles-Gil is a science journalist covering biodiversity, conservation, ocean issues, and Latin America. 

Jaime Rojo is a photographer and National Geographic Explorer who combines his passion for wild nature, conservation and storytelling to create visual communication campaigns that engage the general public on environmental issues.