6:42 a.m. 30 degrees, wind W 0 mph. Sky: in the east, a crescent moon gleams through torn and frayed clouds, not yet white; twilight enriched by remaining yellow leaves; otherwise, woodlands gloomy and cold, and filled with robins. Chickadees, everywhere and bouncy . . . enthusiasm for a frosty morning. Three crows, black below the gray canopy. Wetlands: glazed and still. Pond: reeling mist, quiet surface. Although not much to look at, the alders between the pond and wetlands, still green and leafy, lure birds: chickadees, both kinglets, both nuthatches, song sparrows, and a lonely, dyspeptic blue jay, constantly complaining.
Golden-crowned kinglets make chickadees look big. Chickadees make song sparrows look big. Three days without a red-shouldered hawk, which made every other valley bird look small and fragile.
Yesterday, I saw a monarch butterfly sipping goldenrod nectar in the lower pasture. When through, the butterfly fluttered south, pushed by a northwest breeze. Above the pasture fence and a dimming wall of hardwoods . . .
What is the difference between a maple leaf loosed by the wind and an airborne monarch butterfly, both about the same size? A monarch knows where it's going—a three-thousand-mile trek to a remote forest high in the mountains of Michoacan, Mexico, undiscovered until New Years Day, 1977. So astonishing was the news that more than one hundred million, maybe a billion Halloween-colored butterflies wintered in Mexico, both National Geographic and Natural History ran competing cover stories and The New York Times announced the discovery on page one.
That a butterfly, as fragile as a Vermont summer, ever gets there is a miracle.
From Coyote Hollow, the butterfly follows the Connecticut River south to Long Island Sound. It may cross the Sound and join others that island-hopped from Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket to Block Island, then to the forked tail of Long Island; from Orient Point or Montauk Point, it may travel west along the outer beaches—the Hamptons, Fire Island, Jones Beach, Long Beach, the Rockaways—then across New York Harbor and south down the coastal plain. On October 14, 2000, a monarch banded fifty-seven days earlier, in Essex Junction, VT, landed on the South Fork of Long Island. The butterfly had flown two-hundred-fifty miles, averaging four-and-a-half miles a day.
The alternate route: the butterfly skips an ocean-crossing and follows the Sound's north shore, west along the Connecticut coast. Both routes merge over the Jersey Shore, and together the monarchs fly toward the Gulf, feeding the whole way to Mexico. Once at their overwintering site, the butterflies fast.
In 1996, by some estimations, a billion monarchs overwintered in Mexico.
By 2014, the population had collapsed to thirty-three million.
For a Vermont butterfly to reach Michoacan having negotiated tropical storms, cold fronts (and frosty mornings), hungry mice and shrews, and an altered climate accompanied by out of sync blooms . . . nothing short of miraculous.
4 1/2 miles a day....how many wing flaps on that fit bit?
That is Amazing. And gives me hope.