Monarch Monitoring Project - 9/19/08

Yesterday was a great day for monarchs!! (Finally!) With the help of skilled butterfly catcher Sam Galick (AKA the morning flight counter), I was able to tag and measure over 50 monarchs!! Indeed it was very satisfying, but monarchs were not the only insect in abundance at Cape May yesterday. It was a veritable...

Dragonfly-palooza!!

(Carolina Saddlebags)

Anyone visiting the hawk watch platform yesterday noticed a little more than just hawks. Literally thousands of dragonflies filled the air in an amazing display of mass insect migration. Naturalist/artist/bird guru/dragonfly photographer Michael O'Brien took on the immense challenge of trying to count them all. He proceeded to do four 5-minute point counts on a transect across Cape May Point from Lighthouse Avenue to the dunes at Coral Avenue. Here is what he counted:

Common Green Darner - 4820
Swamp Darner - 2
Calico Pennant - 1
Eastern Pondhawk - 2
Twelve-spotted Skimmer - 1
Blue Dasher - 3
Wandering Glider - 17
Spot-winged Glider - 7
Pantala (glider) sp. - 52
Blue-faced Meadowhawk - 2
Carolina Saddlebags - 32
Black Saddlebags - 45
Tramea (saddlebags) sp. - 45

TOTAL = 5029

Although Michael didn't do his count until around 1 p.m. (a bit after peak dragonfly flight), the numbers still work out to roughly

15,000 dragonflies/hour!!

(Green Darner)

That's a lot of dragonflies!

Thanks to Michael O'Brien for his always awesome pictures and for his dragonfly census information!