PLAYING TAG
Aaaggghhh!!! George and I — and a bunch of cute kids like this one — spent the morning tagging butterflies for Monarch Watch. It was amazingly cool (even though most of the kids weren't coordinated enough to catch anything but dead leaves). The butterflies, making their annual migration to Mexico, stop over at the awesome wetlands here to eat and rest. And volunteers like us catch them and mark them to help scientists monitor population and habitat trends.
Monarch Watch's Web site has a lot of info about the uniqueness of monarchs, such as: "In all the world, no butterflies migrate like the Monarchs of North America. They travel much farther than all other tropical butterflies, up to three thousand miles. They are the only butterflies to make such a long, two way migration ... Amazingly, they fly in masses to the same winter roosts, often to the exact same trees."
So George and I trudged through chest-high wildflowers in the wetlands looking for the little critters. George, who has an amazingly good eye and kung fu net maneuvers, made our first catch, above. When you net one, you record its sex and put a tiny numbered sticker on the "mitten" cell of its wing. At first we caught nothing but boys. Strange. I naturally theorized that the girl butterflies were just smarter and hence didn't get caught as much, but then we discovered that George was slightly confused about the difference between men and women (they evidently haven't gotten to that part in nursing school yet). When we figured out that the boys had two dark spots on the interior of their wings, our scientific data vastly improved.
We ended up catching like 40 butterflies. Some escaped our grasp and some had been tagged already. But we used all 24 of our stickers. We got really lucky when we ran into a guy who told us to get out of the open wetlands and go into a little wooded area where it was shadier. It was amazing. Butterflies were everywhere, flitting all around us like little sun-dappled Tinkerbells. We spotted some sort of monarch orgy on a low branch, and with one swipe I netted 10 butterflies:
posted by kc @ 2:28 PM
5 comments
5 Comments:
George is so cute!
KC, remember, "No touchez pas papillon," from our trip to montreal? Those little school kids were great.
Yes, I remember that! And I remember the living butterfly exhibit that we walked through at the natural history museum in NYC, when we visited during that huge blizzard.
What I love about the wetlands program is that they encourage kids to gently handle the butterflies and learn about them through looking closely and touching them. Their little thoraxes are all rubbery and hardy, and you can hold them by their bodies and the back of their wings, but the rest of them is more fragile. Their little feet are really sticky!
The adult people were all aflutter too with excitement. "I got one!"
We heard one moron talking to his kid, though. The kid asked whether there were crocodiles in the wet parts of the wetlands, and the dad said, "Yeah, there could be." Why would you say that to a kid? That would have traumatized me as a child.
George IS cute. Did you notice the sweat he worked up in that photo hustling after a butterfly?! Hehe
Little Hannah wrote me a letter today:
Beth,
Do you know now exactly what date [you are coming to lawrence] because you know, my birthday is on the 19th, maybe we could hang out.
From,
Hannah
P.S. If you do come would you bring Pippa?
Yeah, that was the Shaolin Butterfly I caught there -- gave me a real workout.
And I wasn't the only one who looked quite fetching this morning; kc and I were wearing our matching gray butterfly-hunting shirts.
And you're right: my first patient in clinicals might be in for a real surprise when I insert that first catheter. I guess I have a 50-50 shot of getting it right.
I never knew that the butterflies stop at the wetlands there. That's a cool program.
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