Please come to Cape May. I miss you.
With much appreciation,
Jenny
I wish I could really send the Monarchs my note. I doubt they are reading my blog post , but it is worth a try. ‘Tis the time for the October stragglers….we only had 17.9 Monarchs/Hour during week 7! This is a far cry from our average at 511.63 Monarchs/Hour during week 3. I am not so secretly hoping that we have a very late-season push. It is not looking promising after today’s count when I observed 0 Monarchs during both the 10 am and 2 pm road surveys. Bummer and a half. Still, there is always work to be done—I am working on entering data from all of our tagged Monarchs so that I can give y’all a summary of our data at the close of our season.
On another note, I was directed to an article about a migratory species of dragonfly, the Wandering Glider, that travels a lot farther than the Monarch butterfly. Cool! So I guess I should rephrase a sentence I wrote in a previous blog post regarding Monarchs being a unique insect making such a spectacular journey….the Monarchs are not unique in making such an incredible voyage. Rather, their mass migration (with an estimated 500,000 migrating from Cape May the morning of September 19th this fall) and the lack of a round trip voyage make this a huge phenomenon. Doing a little research, I have discovered that the Wandering Glider can make an 11,000 mile round trip journey over the Indian Ocean from India to Africa! Several bird species including the Amur Falcon make the same voyage and are able to survive the open-water portion by consuming these dragonflies along the way.
Inspired by an earlier post by Tom about Merlins, I will close with a photo snapped by Michael O’Brien during one of the great migration days this fall. Check out this Merlin flying away with a Monarch tucked into the feet!
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