Cape May 3

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True monarchs of flight. When we were at Cape May last October, people with the Monarch Monitoring Project were netting the lithe little lepidopterans and tagged them with tiny numbered stickers. The project falls under the auspices of the Cape May Bird Observatory, a research wing of the New Jersey Audubon Society that also includes the Avalon Sea Watch and the Cape May Hawk Watch.

The butterfly count runs from September 1 until October 31, and since its inception in 1991, thousands of monarchs have been tagged. Dozens of these labeled Cape May monarchs have been found in Mexico.

When we were there, Louise Zemaitis and others with the monitoring program, were tagging the orange-and-black butterflies and letting others release them. The photo below shows a little girl named Honey giving a recently numbered monarch its freedom.

Its next stopover was Virginia, 140 miles across the Delaware Bay.




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