Cape May 2

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Raptors were not the only thing migrating through Cape May in early October.

Something much more delicate was headed to warmer climes. Something not exactly designed for long-distance flight. If hawks are made of muscle and sinew, then butterflies are made of papier-mâché.

But somehow, every fall the fourth generation of adult monarch butterflies doesn’t, as Dylan Thomas would have said, "go gentle into that good night." Instead they fly south—a long way south. Two thousand miles south. For years no one knew where they went; they just disappeared. Not a single egg, larva, pupa or adult could be found in their summer time range. POOF! All vanished.

In 1937, Frederick Urquhart, a zoology professor at the University of Toronto, and his wife Norah decided they’d find out where the Monarchs go. They literally dedicated over 30 years of their lives to the project, and in the winter of 1974 they solved the mystery. The Monarchs, millions and millions of them, were found on some of the taller mountain peaks west of Mexico City. Today there are five official Monarch sanctuaries there: Cerro Altamirano, Sierra Chincua, Sierra El Campanario, Cerros Chivatí-Huacal and Cerro Pelón.

I remember first reading about where the monarchs went in National Geographic in 1976.









-Top photo taken at Cape May Point State Park, October 2009. Soon after this photo was taken, these two monarchs flew across Delaware Bay, but an even more formidable obstacle awaited them: the Gulf of Mexico.



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