Date: 10/30/2002

Number: 1

Thousands of monarchs per hour were crossing Lavaca Bay this afternoon, generally from ENE to WSW. I plotted many at about 10 degrees north of the late afternoon sun.

Several times I held my arms out in front of me with thumb tips touching (I'm six-one) and between my upward pointing index fingers (framed!) I could see twenty-five monarchs.

Many monarchs were stopping to nectar. At 5 pm, I counted 36 monarchs nectaring on a 10 X 20 foot patch of short seaside goldenrod. Saw several coupled pairs both nectaring and crossing the bay.

About 5:10 it dawned on me that many were "coming back"--about 2 out of 5. At 5:20, almost half were on a heading back between north and northeast ... almost as if they didn't want to make the three and a half mile trip across the bay before sundown.

About 5:30, as I was standing on the shell beach road about fifty feet from edge of the bay, there were hundreds of monarchs milling around me, that then slowly dispersed northward to the clustering sites. There were a few, very few, that flew on across the bay after 5:45. After 5:45, I started looking, and the best cluster in a three foot square had about 75 monarchs in it. Clusters were forming up and down the beach as far as I could see, on brush and taller weeds along the shell beach.

We've tried for years to figure out where the monarchs that were trying to cross the bay in October and November might cluster for the night. This was the first time to be in the right place. I was standing in the middle of hundreds that were milling around between 5:30 and sunset about 5:45. I saw more monarchs during those two hours yesterday than I have seen in the past seven years combined ... it was fantastic!

Second day of sun, light northeast wind. The wind was calming, the sun was setting, air was still warm ~80 degrees F. A front coming in tonight. The site is twenty miles inland of the Gulf barrier islands.

Monarchs in numbers were reported up the coast yesterday, about 130 miles northeast of us, so we were expecting some, but not thousands, of monarchs today.

Port Lavaca, TX

Latitude: 28.5 Longitude: -96.7

Observed by: Harlen E.
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