Date: 09/24/2009
Number: 30000
Greg L. and I were returning from a trip to west Texas this morning when we stopped in at Balmorhea Lake. It was cool, cloudy and windy, and while looking through hoards of swallows pushed down by the weather, we noticed strange" clusters" in some of the Salt Cedars below the dam. A closer look showed them to be clumps of resting Monarchs. We estimate that there were a minimum of 30,000 individuals in just the few trees we could see from the dam. One small tree close to the dam had 3,500
- 4,000 Monarchs, and we got some nice photos of them.
A bit more information about our experience yesterday morning. It was in the low sixties at the lake, overcast with a cold, stiff SE wing blowing over the lake. We had seen handfuls of Monarchs drifting around the dam, but initially were preoccupied with the many swallows feeding close by. Once we spotted the first group - the largest - we looked for more and found at least five more trees with large concentrations in them. The one we photographed (not the largest) was closest to the dam; Greg eventually walked all around it, and we estimated there were 3,500 - 4,000 individuals in that one tree. Interestingly, at one point a strong gust seemed to dislodge a number of Monarchs - it looked like 700 - 1,000 flew up in a blizzard and worked their way down to other sheltered spots - but looking back at the tree they had just left, we could not see any discernible reduction in the number of monarchs! It got slightly warmer, and a small number of individuals left each cluster but when we left the dam the majority were still in-place. At the north end of the dam there was a line of Salt Cedars that could have had more monarchs, but the lee side was away from us so we could not tell. We did find two small groups on smaller bushes close to the track - maybe 200 in total.
Balmorhea Lake, TX
Latitude: 31 Longitude: -103.7
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