Monarch Monitoring Project: Week 5 & 6 Update

Hooray for a second big push of Monarchs! And wow, how have weeks 5 and 6 already passed? This means only two more weeks to the Monarch season, which is a very sad day indeed. Sorry for the long-belated post. My only excuse is that I was distracted, in a really good way, by the arrival of more Monarchs in Cape May.

Brief summary of our road counts:
Week 5: 50.66 Monarchs/hour
Week 6: 233.45 Monarchs/hour

Now, as you may notice from above numbers, week 6 was when we had the recent big push. I got to have another day where I could exclaim (happily, of course) "MONARCHS, MONARCHS, MONARCHS!!!" It wasn't to quite the same extent as the HUGE flight on September 19th, but it was close. Monarchs were everywhere in the point, clustering particularly on the seaside goldenrod that was sprinkled across the dunes.

Monarchs nectaring on some delicious seaside goldenrod (photo by Michael O'Brien)

A group of us stood on the platform at the end of Coral Ave. to watch the Monarchs stream across the dunes. Admittedly, it wasn't as impressive if you didn't look through your binoculars. Naked eye, there were some winged creatures flying about. But through the binoculars, oh boy! They were little flying specks in the sky. Goldenrod was covered with black and orange. It was beautiful. The sun was shining, the temperature reached high 70s, and there were Monarchs. Yep, it was a pretty stellar day.

Woohoo! Look at those Monarchs on the goldenrod in front of the lighthouse! (photo by Michael O'Brien)

It is also worth mentioning that Michael O'Brien counted 351 Monarchs on the 9 am census whereas I only counted 87 on the noon census. Reason for this difference? Well, obviously Michael could not bear to have me beat his record and he turned off the Monarch switch (shhhh, don't tell anyone, but we keep the Cape May Monarchs in a special, large, underground room in an undisclosed location on the point). That would be pretty cool if that were true. In reality, the winds shifted right before the noon count, so the Monarchs were not as abundantly flying along the dunes. However, the number of dragonflies was incredible! Lately, there also has been an abundance of Red Admirals, Buckeyes, and now that the skies are blue and free of clouds, we are even seeing some Cloudless Sulphurs! Hopefully we will have this butterfly push for a bit longer before the days get colder and the flowers no longer have nectar.