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Sunday 19 August 2018

The Mighty Monarch Butterfly Mating

Every year, I recall the season when we are most likely to see a lot of butterflies. Generally it's end of Aug, very early Sept. For the Monarchs, it is the beginning of their migration time. If you ever get a chance to, it's very interesting to read about the life cycle of the Monarch Butterfly, it's just amazing and interesting! These seemingly delicate creatures, the 4th generation being the one that makes the trip to Mexico.

Doris McCarthy Trail, in Scarborough (now the City of Toronto), is one of our favourite places to go. It has the combination of varying terrain of a light forest and treed area as well as the lake shore, some inclines for exercise, it's not super long, it has ideal conditions for birds and butterflies, there are the bluffs, it's never super crowded with people like Bluffers Park yet has the same landmarks and aspects. It's definitely worth checking out, especially in Spring and late Summer. Spring, it attracts a lot of migratory birds, it has humming birds pretty much the whole season into Fall, and it has raptors and cliff swallows, as well as Cedar Waxwings. The wild flowers are always abundant, especially in the meadow like area at the west end when you reach the end of the terrain and hit the breaker wall of rock and an inlet of Lake Ontario. Lots of butterflies fuel up there and can be seen in the hundreds in late Aug. Lots of Swallow Tails and Monarchs. We even got the pleasure of seeing a Cedar Waxwing in a nest, in mid July.


Yesterday, as soon as we came off the trail down, at the lake shore area, we spotted pairs of coupled Monarchs floating through the sky and landing on trees and plants. We must have timed our trek right, to hit the mating for the 4th generation of the life cycle, the one that is then born and makes the journey to Mexico.

The landscape is so gorgeous and wild, so full of living creatures and beautiful plant life, but death too sometimes. A couple weeks ago, we ran into the pretty much disintegrated carcass of a white tailed deer. Patches of hair everywhere, ribs and bones scattered around. This trip down, there was little sign of it left, just a patch or 2 of its course hair and a couple small bones.