[NatureNS] Monarch update - Valley

Date: Tue, 09 Aug 2011 11:30:09 -0300
From: Larry Bogan <larry@bogan.ca>
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:5.0) Gecko/20110624 Thunderbird/5.0
To: NatureNS <naturens@chebucto.ns.ca>
Precedence: bulk
Return-Path: <naturens-mml-owner@chebucto.ns.ca>
Original-Recipient: rfc822;"| (cd /csuite/info/Environment/FNSN/MList; /csuite/lib/arch2html)"

next message in archive
no next message in thread
previous message in archive
Index of Subjects


Hi all,
   We have had as many as three, maybe four Monarch butterflies in our 
field early last week.  Over the last several weeks, we have been 
casually collecting small Common Milkweed plants with eggs and small 
larvae on them.  At the moment we have 16 larvae munching away on leaves 
in the house and  a few to yet emerge from eggs.  There are already 
three pupae hanging in screened in boxes going through their 
transformations plus one that escaped and is hanging from the top of one 
of our window frames.

  Last week we had our field of milkweed mowed by our neighbor who is 
very wary of letting this 'noxious weed' escape onto his farmland.  The 
milkweed had flowered and was setting seedpods and had to be cut to 
prevent wide-spread dispersal of the seed.   We still see at least one 
Monarch flying around visiting flowers and there is still plenty of 
milkweed growing near our buildings for them to lay on.  There is also 
milkweed in the ditch on Brooklyn Street and in nearby agriculatural 
fields so ours  is not the only source of milkweed in the area.

We just received our tags from Monarch Watch and will be tagging up to 
25 butterflies this year.  Included was a newsletter describing the 
outlook for population this year. It says " We can expect a low year for 
monarchs...The migration should be particularly low in the New England 
area...."   More information is available at http://monarchwatch.org.

Cheers,
Larry Bogan
Cambridge Station, NS


next message in archive
no next message in thread
previous message in archive
Index of Subjects