Butterflies, oh the butterflies
We went on a grand adventure today to go see the Monarch butterflies in Santa Cruz. Their migration time has just started, and Santa Cruz is one of their stop off points along the way. (Wise little guys!) We met up with about 50 of our dearest friends, (and that’s not much of an exaggeration, I just counted and there were 38 of us) and we hit the Monarch trail on Natural Bridges park. This is what we saw:
See the butterfly? There in the bush? Yeah, the kids had trouble with it too. So we were thrilled when we lucked upon this guy:
He was just hanging out a bit off of the path, on the ground. It’s possible that he’d just come out of his cocoon, as he was shaking his wings a bit and staying on the ground despite considerable danger- he almost got trampled on 2 or 3 times and didn’t fly away. We got to watch him for a good 5 minutes before he flew up into the bush.
I LOVE this picture. He’s coming to geeeeeeet you!
We found the wings of a dead butterfly (we named one of the moms the Butterfly Corpse Scavenger because she kept finding them) and the kids got to look at them up close.
On our way out, we found this fellow having a snack.
Check out his curly tongue! So cool!
I couldn’t get any pictures of the butterflies swarming around in the sky, but it was gorgeous. Once the sun came out and it got a little warmer, they were flying around everywhere, and it really was breathtaking. I could have stayed there all day just watching them. We’ll have to go back again in a couple of months, when there are even more there.