This year, 2009 I had been noticing that
there were no dead monarchs on the dusty back road I live on.
There are usually hundreds of dead ones on a normal year. It
always disturbs me that this is so. But this year there was
not one dead one that I could see. And worse, I was not seeing
any live flying monarchs either. So
I was happy one day, August 20 - much too late in the summer
- to notice one small one flying about our yard.
It was the next day I had
one try to kill itself slapping into the car window as I passed
The Ruby road swamp.
Then a day or two later what
may have been the same monarch I saw August twentieth showed
up again on Carol’s lot in the morning when we both
saw it while together.
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Later the same day I spotted it, or another, in the yard and
grabbed my camera and went chasing it about the yard, when
I was lucky enough to get the picture you see here. Just after
this I tried to follow it as it flew off and finally to the
rear forest line on our land where I could no longer see it.
At this point I turned totally around and immediately noticed
a monarch way up high at the opposite end of the lot. It was
gliding without a flap of its wings and took a long straight
path to the woods where my subject had disappeared. So what
you see here is identifiably female apparently. Pheromones
are powerful it seems and despite the needed food for the
caterpillars to reach the pupae stage, milkweed, now all drying
up and dying in the fields, these very lonely monarchs were
likely to try and procreate, from the looks of it.
A number of other persons
have also noted the absence of these beautiful butterflies
this year. It’s a shame if this is a point of destruction
for them, as many specialists have been warning. The loss
of Mexican forest wintering over place, combined with this
wind and weather change this year, is not looking good.
And what does it indicate
for our own lives?
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