The Incredible Journey of the Butterflies
January 27th, 2009 |
| Glynn Wilson |
| Watching the monarch migration makes me long for spring… |
Orange-and-black wings fill the sky as NOVA charts one of nature’s most remarkable phenomena: the epic migration of monarch butterflies across North America.
Public television should still be a part of everyone’s media mix, even though it’s too bad they have to be sponsored by Exxon Mobile. If you missed the show Tuesday night, Jan. 27, you should be able to catch it on the replay or online.
I’ve written about this migration many times and photographed them too many times, and I learned a lot I didn’t know. Did you know one generation of the butterflies make the journey south to Mexico, while it takes three generations to get back to Canada?
NOVA’s filmmakers followed monarchs on the wing throughout their extraordinary odyssey. To capture a butterfly’s point of view, camera operators used a helicopter, ultralight, and hot-air balloon for aerial views along the butterflies’ transcontinental route.
The film opens with caterpillars munching milkweed in southern Canada in late summer. Soon each caterpillar transforms itself into a silky chrysalis. Roughly 10 days later, a delicate four-winged monarch emerges.
Then, at some unknown signal, the monarchs take to the air on a two-month, 2,000-mile flight over fields, forests, cities, plains, open water, deserts, and finally mountains to congregate in a tiny, high-altitude region of central Mexico where they’ve never been before. Incredibly, they arrive by the millions at the same time each year.
