Don Freiday planned to host a poker game Saturday night. He canceled it, amid one of the most spectacular shows nature has put on in years. Saturday evening, hundreds of thousands of monarch butterflies converged at Cape May Point in New Jersey. "It was off the scale," said Freiday, director of birding programs at the Cape May Bird Observatory. Thousands of butterflies rested on shrubs and trees. He estimates the number at about half a million.
Then on Sunday morning came a picture-perfect beach day -- and the monarchs began to fly across Delaware Bay. "There were just hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them," said Diane Kane, who came to the Cape Henlopen Hawk Watch to count birds on Sunday morning. "The sky was just littered with them."
Forrest Rowland said he was birding at Prime Hook when he got a call from a colleague in New Jersey. Doug Gochfeld, who was at the Cape May Hawk Watch Sunday morning, called Rowland about the butterflies early on. "The monarchs here are crazy," Gochfeld said. Rowland, who runs the Cape Henlopen Hawk Watch, said he wasn't all that interested until Gochfeld called him back and said: "This is like getting 500 golden eagles. You've got to see this." So Rowland went to Cape Henlopen and as the morning when on, he couldn't believe what he saw.
By 10:15 a.m., he was counting 50 monarchs a minute. By 11, there were hundreds. "The whole sky was covered with monarchs," he said. By most accounts, the migration started just before 8 a.m. and ended around noon. "I've never, ever seen anything like it," he said. It was the sort of natural event that people likely will be talking about for years to come. Freiday said that many of the top naturalists in the Cape May area are ranking the migration phenomenon as among the top five natural history events they have witnessed. "There were places where they were just covering the trees," he said.
On Sunday, Freiday said he was on the dunes and "it was liking being in a snow globe except orange instead of white." The last big year on record for a monarch migration was in 1999, he said.
But in history, events like this may not have been that unusual, said Douglas W. Tallamy, professor and chairman of entomology and wildlife ecology at the University of Delaware. Large monarch migrations were recorded in earlier scientific literature, he said. And earlier in this decade, researchers identified the Eastern Shore of Virginia as an important accumulation point for monarchs during their fall migration.
Here in Delaware, there are still monarch larvae around, but the Canadian monarchs have already begun their southward migration, Tallamy said.
The nonprofit MonarchWatch estimated that typically monarchs move through our area from Sept. 19 to Oct. 1.
One possible explanation for the explosion in monarchs may be the same thing that has made many species of butterflies thrive this year. "The year before there were almost no butterflies" in our area, Tallamy said. The spring of 2009 was cold and wet at the time the first generation would have emerged. With butterfly densities so low, Tallamy believes it is likely that parasites and predators couldn't track the insects. Meanwhile, all the rain was great for the vegetation. With plenty to eat and low mortality, the hatch that went into winter was likely strong. "That set the stage for tremendous winter survivorship," he said. Then, in the winter, there was record snow, which protected the insects both from predators and from loss of moisture. "Right away in the spring, we had a lot of butterflies," he said.
Brian Taber, president of the Coastal Virginia Wildlife Observatory, said the predictions for monarchs this season were actually pretty bleak. But at Kiptopeke State Park, at the southernmost tip of Delmarva, observers are beginning to see large numbers of monarchs -- including about 15,000 on Wednesday at a roosting area in the park, he said. Here in Delaware, it's been a great year for monarchs, buckeyes, tiger swallowtails and spice bush butterflies.
"It's the year of the butterfly," he said.
credits: this article was published in The News Journal on Sep-23-2010, and written by Molly Murray
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