The monarch butterfly gets down to serious business in fields of wildflowers. It feeds on the nectar of many kinds of flowers. Here the food of choice is the milkweed, whose flowers burst in lavender and purple hues on stately stalks. The aroma of common milkweed is uncommonly pleasant. The first time I was made aware of it was in northern Pennsylvania on a hilltop meadow. I had been lying on the grasses, watching a raptor circling in the sky above, that beautiful afternoon.
I was unaware at the time that, much like the raptor soaring above, the fragile monarch butterfly annually undertakes the immense task of migrating south. We've learned to expect it of birds. . . , so very many do it. But, who could expect massive migration of so slight a creature, on the scale of creation?
And, massive it
certainly is, because these butterflies travel
many thousands of miles to winter in Southern
California, Baja, and Mexico.
There, they festoon tree branches, carpet
meadows, and drape tree trunks by their millions
of soft bodies, a riot of orange and black wings.
As though that were not incredible enough, after spending their winter months congregated together, they make the return flight in the spring, females depositing eggs along the way depending on their individual maturity and fertility status. The result is wide distribution of maturing monarch caterpillars across North America, both in stage of development and location of the particular milkweed site.
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