Ready For Change, Photos.

~~~

“Who are you,” said the caterpillar.
This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation.
Alice replied, rather shyly,
“I—I hardly know, Sir, just at present—
at least I know who I was when I got up this morning,
but I think I must have changed several times since then.”

Lewis Carroll [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson]

My daughter and I went to the Monarch Butterfly Natural Preserve in Santa Cruz yesterday. The park’s Monarch Grove provides a temporary home for over 100,000 Monarchs each winter. From mid-October through the end of February, the Monarchs form a “city in the trees.” This is the only State Monarch Preserve in California.

I am happy to report that I will soon have limited edition professionally printed poster sized prints of my Scatterlings© line.

The Santa Cruz preserve is inviting art and poems on butterflies – I hope to have prints available there during the February Migration Event.

The length of a butterfly journey exceeds the normal lifespan of most monarchs, which is less than two months for butterflies born in early summer. The last generation of the summer enters into a non-reproductive phase known as diapause and may live seven months or more. During diapause, butterflies fly to one of many overwintering sites. The generation that overwinters generally does not reproduce until it leaves the overwintering site sometime in February and March.

Here’s my butterfly whisperer, Alicia, home for Thanksgiving.

Ducks in ponds in the preserve; covered from the green of the eucalyptus trees.

Self portrait; passing Pigeon Point.

The Greater Bay Area is lucky to have several monarch layover spots:
San Leandro (1-510-577-6085 or email butterflynaturalist@earthlink.net);
Fremont (1-510-796-0199 or visit ebparks.org/parks/ardenwood);
Santa Cruz (1-831-423-4609, 1-831-420-5270, 1-831-429-2850);
Pacific Grove (1-831-648-5716, 1-831-648-5730 or pgmuseum.org);
Point Lobos (1-831-624-4909). Be sure to go on a mild, calm day.

Off Highway 1, midway to Santa Cruz.

The butterflies do not like wind. It is a truly awesome experience to stand in a eucalyptus grove and look up at thousands and thousands of monarchs fluttering in the sunlight and shade.

Near Half Moon Bay… I witnessed no pumpkin shortage in our area.