A Magical Moment after Metamorphosis

I've been at the Croquet Club all day because we had a national coach here to give us some, well, as you might expect, coaching.  After it was all over I was standing by a Swan Plant which is the food plant of the caterpillar of the Monarch Butterfly.  As I stood looking at the swelling larvae on the plant I realised that there was a recently pupated butterfly at my feet warming itself in the sun to dry out its wings.  Despite the sun the wind today has been very cold and so I allowed the butterfly to crawl onto my hand with a view to moving it into a more sheltered sunny spot and, of course, with a view to photographing it.  The main problem I then had was that it adopted me and I could not get it to stop clinging on (which feels strangely odd, I have to say) so that I could put it down in its new sunning spot.

A Feast Of Monarchs

I have posted on Monarch Butterflies on a number of occasions.  However when we went to visit Chris, a friend of Pauline, on Sunday the garden was a veritable feast of Monarch delights:

    

Quick Draw McGraw

I like to carry my camera with me all the time and I know I'm not alone.  Although Wendy said a few days ago that she'd seen something she'd wanted to photograph but for several weeks had forgotten to take her camera with her to photograph it.  But then I had years of indoctrination by my Dad and years of carrying a camera out of choice and practice.  Now, of course even if I don't have my camera in my hand my phone's camera is good enough for many emergencies.  

The Monarch butterfly is exceptionally hard to photograph because it is rarely still unless it is on a swan plant and even then I've not had much success.  However as I was walking through the centre of Napier to the Library the other day a Monarch landed on a plant a few feet from me.  I had my camera in my hand and set before a horse could have swished its tail twice.  I was pleased with the result:

 

 

And for those who remember, Quick Draw McGraw

The Monarch Butterfly

Nearly a year ago I blogged on butterflies I regularly see (saw) in New Zealand. I notice that in that posting I mentioned the Swan Plant that I also mentioned in a posting a few weeks ago. Because I had never seen one in reality until a few weeks ago I didn't connect the two. Anyway last week I was up at Pukatapu School taking the children swimming (it was the school summer holidays) and I went into the native garden which is rather run down and overgrown but a wonderful haven for the Monarch Butterfly. I see Monarchs all the time all over the place here but until that moment I'd only once seen one at rest (an d the battery in my camera failed at that very moment!). So last week I managed my first ever photograph of a Monarch Butterfly and its caterpillars in the wild.

Swan Plants

When I went into the Club House (or is it Clubhouse?) in Wanganui on Sunday there was a bowl on the table filled with funny green things that I took to be fruits. When I picked one up it was almost as light as air and appeared to be empty. I had never seen one before. They are, apparently, Gomphocarpus fruticosus or Swan Plant. They are a member of the Milkweed genus. They are a host to the Monarch Butterfly caterpillars.

The Monarch Butterfly

Probably the most commonly seen butterfly around Napier is the White.


Possibly the most common, although because it is very small (25mm wingspan) and lives very close to the ground it is rarely seen, is the Common Blue.


However the most noticeable is the Monarch or, in Maori, Kahuku. The Monarch arrived in New Zealand at least 120 years ago having crossed the Pacific from North America. It is this country's largest resident butterfly and is very common on warm sunny days particularly near its caterpillar's food - the swan plant (Gomphocarpus physocarpus). It spends two weeks as a caterpillar, two as a chrysalis then lives for about 2 months as a butterfly.

So this photo is one that I took when near Exeter with CJ, Helen and Ian last September. It is a male: note the black scent pouches near the bottom of the black veins nearest the body.


I would probably have written this posting anyway because the Monarch is so beautiful but I was even more fascinated by its migration story.

The Monarch is the only butterfly in the world known regularly to undertake [note the joined infinitive] a two-way migration. Indeed one female holds the record for the longest known insect migration, having flown 3432 kilometres from Canada to Mexico. At average speeds of up to 130 km each day this would have taken almost a month flying at altitudes of up to 1000 metres. Each year, at the end of summer, at least 100 million Monarchs [not an endangered species yet then!] make a similar southward journey to the mountain ranges of Mexico where they hibernate in the pine forests. At the end of winter they mate and start on their long journey back North. The most incredible thing about this northward journey is that it takes up to 5 generations 'leap-frogging' each other until the great, great, great grandchildren find their Canadian summer home again! How do they know where to go? No one knows.

In spite of its incredible journeys overseas, however, New Zealand Monarchs do not migrate long distances.

I have only once seen a Monarch butterfly land here although they fly around constantly very close - particularly on the Croquet lawn where they 'buzz' the balls. On the occasion that I did see one land the batteries ran out on my camera just before I tried to take the photo. By the time I'd put the new batteries in it had gone. Ah well.

Gomphocarpus physocarpus - Swan Plant