Today's catch - monarch butterfly

[lblanchard]

100_0026
Originally uploaded by lb_philly.

Sitting in a hotel meeting room waiting to do a presentation.

This is a butterfly I saw on my way to the meeting site in Silver Spring MD -- first photo outing with the replacement camera.

Comments

[karenkay.livejournal.com]

Gorgeous photo, but I think he should be on his way to Mexico already!

[lblanchard.livejournal.com]

He's such a nice, brightly-colored fellow that I think he's probably a late hatching. I understand that the very butterflies who leave the north may not be the ones who arrive in Mexico. I think they breed and die / hatch and move on in multiple generations.

[karenkay.livejournal.com]

I googled to try and answer this question, and came across this lovely site:
http://www.learner.org/jnorth/tm/monarch/AboutFall.html

Digging further, on http://www.learner.org/jnorth/monarch/fall2008/Update102308.html, I found this:
"Too Late to Migrate?
People are worried that monarchs will get caught by cold temperatures and will not be able to migrate. There is hope! A discovery last week by Dick Walton's team shows how quickly monarchs can travel when the wind and weather are right:

A monarch they tagged in New Jersey on October 9th was found in Georgia just 3 days later. That's a distance of 558 miles!

Let's hope for more warm days in the north so the remaining monarchs can escape."

There are maps that show the migration pathways on the second page I mentioned.

Our bats migrate to Mexico every year, too, but I don't think they have such an extensive website monitoring their migration.