Preparing for Migration

Preparations are underway for Field Season #30 with the Monarch Monitoring Project in Cape May.  Our research work begins on September 1, and this year's seasonal Field Naturalist Interns begin their  training on August 25.  In the coming days we will introduce you to this year's team.

Monarchs have been more numerous than usual in our area this summer, with an impressive 167 counted on the Cape May Butterfly Count, which was held on July 24.  These aren't Mexico-bound migrant monarchs, their the parents (or in some cases, the grandparents) of those that will be making the long journey in the fall.  Does this mean we will have a big migration coming up?  There's no way to tell, alas, it all depends on how successfully these generations reproduce, which is influenced by the weather.  Even more important is how well the monarchs are doing to our north.  When autumn cold fronts bring northwest winds into Cape May, we see monarchs migrating from the eastern Great Lakes region all the way east to the Atlantic coast of southern Canada.  When winds blow from the east, as happened for much of September 2018, most of the southbound monarchs seem to end up on the west side of Delaware Bay, missing Cape May altogether.  This may disappoint us, but it's probably good for the monarchs, as the crossing of Delaware Bay is hazardous and we know that some butterflies perish over the water.

Expect much more frequent blog posts now until our season winds down in early November.  In another upcoming post we will list all of the scheduled public programs coming up during the fall migration season.  We welcome all monarch enthusiasts, whether intense or casual in interest, to come to Cape May and join us in appreciation of this migratory phenomenon.  Two requests for the more serious monarch fans:

1. If you tag monarchs in Cape May, please share your tagging data with us, as we want to keep track of all monarchs tagged in and around Cape May, and of course don't enter private property or closed areas (such as the dunes at Cape May Point) without expressed permission to do so.

2. If you raise monarchs, please do not bring them to Cape May for release.  This will be our 28th year of conducting systematic censuses of monarchs in Cape May, one of the longest, most consistent data sets on monarch populations in existence.  Imported monarchs can skew our numbers and reduce the validity of our data.  Also, the water crossing of Delaware Bay is hazardous, as noted above -- you're probably not doing monarchs a favor by bringing them to the Cape.