..or are they?
Pacific Grove – where we stayed over Thanksgiving break – has an interesting recent history. The town began as a Methodist summer camp and has evolved into an admittedly dense, but still relaxing town on the peninsula.
Apparently the butterflies find it so!
For Pacific Grove is one of the spots where monarch butterflies who are migrating west of the Rockies winter. This migration is fascinating and mind-boggling, especially when you consider that it’s not as if a single generation makes it down south and back up – I believe it’s at least two generations. So the butterflies that return are not the same butterflies who left.
November is a good time to see the butterflies, who settle in a sanctuary that was just a couple of blocks down from the cottage we rented. It’s a grove of trees in back of a motel.
So…you walk back through that little alley, get to the trees, look up, and see….what?
Got it?
Yeah, me neither – not at first.
But wait..see the brown clumps?
Those are all monarchs – huddled together, hanging tight because of the chilly air.
We stopped by twice, and each time volunteers were present to help us see more clearly – old folks with binoculars, dedicated in that wonderful way the enthusiast volunteer always is – to helping the passers-by and the curious catch the fever. And we did – for looking through the scopes, you could really see them, listen to the story of how they arrived and where they’re going, and marvel and this mystery of one more creature on a journey through life, led by what, they could not say.
(This is a link to a full-scale version of the photo – you can see the clumps better.)
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