Lake Luzerne couple nurses butterfly back to health; trucker at Saratoga stop takes it to Fla.

How do you get a monarch butterfly back in the air and back on the migration trail to Mexico after it suffers a broken wing?

For an upstate New York couple, all it took was some ingenuity and a southbound trucker.

Jeannette Brandt recently found the injured butterfly while riding her bike near her home in the southern Adirondacks. She and Mike Parwana fed the butterfly from the fruit and honey they produce on their Lake Luzerne property.

Then they found out on the Internet how to fix a broken butterfly wing using shreds of cardboard as a splint. After about a week, the monarch was able to fly again.

The next step was getting the butterfly to a warmer climate. So they placed the butterfly in shoe box and headed to a truck stop outside Saratoga Springs. A trucker from Alabama who was headed to Florida agreed to transport the unusual cargo.

On Tuesday the trucker called the couple and said the butterfly had been set free in Florida, where tens of millions of other monarchs are making their winter migration to the mountains of central Mexico.

(Copyright 2008 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)