Brower was born to Bailey and Helen Pierson Brower in
Madison, New Jersey, in 1931. He was raised in
Chatham Township, New Jersey, where he showed interest in butterflies. In an oral history, he recalled being punished at school, being made to sit all day for skipping a class to go out and collect a species of moth; asked whether it was worth it, he stated "Absolutely". He met Jane Van Zandt while a student at
Chatham High School. They spent two years at
Oxford University, the first as
Fulbright scholars, in
E. B. Ford's ecological genetics laboratory. He then lectured at
Amherst College from 1958, rising to the endowed Stone Professorship in 1976. In 1980 he moved to the zoology department at the
University of Florida. On retiring in 1997, he moved to
Sweet Briar College as a research professor. A butterfly and moth collector from an early age, he began studying the biology of the
monarch butterfly while a postgraduate at Yale in 1954, and became a world expert on the species over six decades. He contributed to over 200 papers and 8 films, combining research, public education and conservation work. Unlike some popular sources, Brower did not suppose the monarch to be in danger of extinction, though he agreed that its migration across America was threatened. He led a team of researchers studying the ecology of the overwintering grounds of the monarch in the mountains of Michoacan, Mexico, starting in the winter of 1977, incorporating aspects of thermal biology, predator-prey interactions, and
chemical ecology. In the 1980s, he assisted conservation groups in Mexico and the Mexican government to protect fir forests used by the species from logging. In the last decades of his life, he recorded the sharp decline in the monarch population of North America, down by some 80% in the 20 years to 2018, attributed to herbicides, logging, and weather events. He was the only scientist to sign a 2014 petition to the US government to give the monarch legal protection. He advised the novelist
Barbara Kingsolver on butterfly migration for her 2012 book
Flight Behavior. ==Family==