Last Thursday, MPR aired a story titled Minnesota monarch butterfly population falls.
Minnesota’s monarch butterfly population is 38 percent below average this summer, according to preliminary statistics from University of Minnesota’s Monarch Lab. Cool, dry weather is likely the prime culprit, but ecologists also suspect human beings are playing a role.
Robbie and I went for a walk in the lower Carleton Arb on Saturday evening and the monarchs were plentiful… and amenable to being photographed up close. Click the thumbnails to enlarge and then click the green arrow to enlarge further.
Cool. MPR’s Bob Collin’s featured the left photo of the monarchs in his Five at 8 post to his News Cut blog today, part of his “Show me your August!” photo series.
A friend of mine who lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma and is an English woman, and avid gardener, agreed with an observation I had made earlier this summer about the larger size and different markings we had seen on the monarch butterflies of both Southern and Jamaican species.
I wonder if it’s evolution or more nutritious milkweed or ???