Hey, a repost is better than calling in sick, hey.
I've been seeing Monarch butterflies flying over our building today after hatching on a warm day. They must head north, so up the side of our building they go and off they go to who knows where. I thought it was someone a long way away and that I had posted about it in the past. While I have posted about Monarch butterflies before, a blog search brought up this post, which is a repost.The text below is my butterfly post.
Here is a link to what I think was quite an amusing post about another monarch. There is a comment from the late and lovely Cranky Bar.
Sunday we were home for a good bit. I suppose because of the good rainfall this year there are lot of dragonflies and butterflies around. We have seen quite a lot up at our level. Yesterday there were many many monarch butterflies. After a bit I started watching where they were coming from and going to.
They were rising from somewhere at the base of the building and flying upwards, past our balcony and onto or over the roof. At a guess over the whole day the figure was certainly in the hundreds. They just kept coming and coming. Time for some research.
First thing that I learnt was that we in Australia know them as wanderer butterflies. They only eat and are born on milk weed plants, which I later learnt was untrue, and their life cycle is typical of a butterfly, eggs are laid on the underside of a plant leaf, they grow into caterpillars, pupate then come out as a butterflies.
They are native to North America and probably arrived in Australia and New Zealand by island hopping in the 19th century as white man planted exotic plants on the islands.
They are poisonousness to birds.
Kiwi Nomad has taken a good photo of one here.
Interesting but none of this explains what happened yesterday. Here is my theory. They were crawling out of their pupas and drying their wings during the day on plants at the base of the highrise. They are pre programmed to fly in a certain direction. To go in that direction they had to fly up the side of the highrise and over the top. I doubt there was anything on the roof to attract them so they went on the merry way to wherever they were going. There was only ever three visible at once, but they mostly flew up singly.
It was quite a special sight. Of course everytime I went for the camera, they stopped coming, as if they knew. The few shots I did take are not worth posting.
Today, Monday, there were a few stragglers in the late afternoon, following the same path.