Date: 07/21/2015

Number: 2

I took my kids to Rolling Hills waterpark today. This park has an extensive prairie, with plantings even filling the medians in the parking lot. Immediately upon entering the park, I saw a monarch flying over a patch of swamp milkweed. Sunny, 75F, gorgeous out. As we left the park 4 hours later I saw another monarch. There were leps flying around us in the waterpark, including a skipoer that insisted on puddling near the baby water play area.

I have never seen anything like the wave/front of egg-laying females in my NW Ohio area over the last four days. It is like watching the premigration come through the Lake Erie Islands. Friends are texting me, finding eggs at work, at home, parks, etc. I posted to my WIld Ones chapter FB page and told people to go outside and check their milkweed patch. Within an hour, the President of our chapter, Hal, texted me that he was watching a female oviposit at that moment. And he got a photo of an 8 spotted forester nectaring on his A.i., late for this lep to be in flight here. Then another WO member Rick texted he had monarchs in his yard. Eric Peterson, who had been hanging a billboard in Fremont earlier in the day and saw a female ovipositing in the ROW where ODOT has refrained from mowing this year, came home to find a female ovipositing in his own yard. Then my friend Linda Penn, who comes to my yard to care for my cats and look for eggs when I am out of town, found eggs and two 2nd instars in my yard on Fri and found eggs in her own yard last night. The science teacher at Toledo Christian school also reported his first eggs of the year, on swamp milkweed in the school garden. I found a female ovipositing at Olander Park on swamp milkweed. All these locations are 20-30 minutes around me. The monarchs are on South Bass island in Lake Erie now too. I had only one Gen 2 egg, and a WO friend had 3 she was raising. Mine eclosed on Fri, and hers eclosed Fri and Sat. So Gen 2 adults are emerging, but holy cow--I can't believe the eggs we are seeing now. I find it hard to believe all these Gen 3 eggs could all be from locally-produced Gen 2 adults. But who knows. We had a round of strong storms last week, and as my family and I drove home from Traverse City on Saturday morning, we were trying to dodge a line of storms that extended almost the entire length of lower MI, moving east over Lake Michigan and then across MI. Just makes me wonder....

ypsilanti, MI

Latitude: 42.2 Longitude: -83.6

Observed by: candy
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