Date: 09/03/2018

Number: 15000

Thousands upon thousands of monarchs at our ranch now hanging in trees in northern Nebraska 15 miles south of Johnstown. They arrived on Labor Day, stayed all week long, and are still there (as of 9/10/18). I have never in my life seen anything like it.

The 16,000-acre ranch (6 miles wide, 4 deep), contains 200 acres of cottonwoods that were planted by the original settlers. We built a lodge in a big tree grove. As we drove along the grove on Labor Day (9/3/18) the trees were full! There were hundreds and hundreds hanging in each tree.

How can we quantify? I don’t know! Let’s say we have 150 trees along the road. Maybe 30 were full of monarchs, hundreds and hundreds per tree! They were always on the lower levels, not high up in cottonwoods. It would be a safe underestimate to say we had 15,000 just along our driveway (30 trees X 500 butterflies per tree = 15,000).

But this isn’t all. We have another grove 4 miles south of here and THOSE trees were full, and the neighbor’s trees were full too. The butterflies were here all week (9/3/18-9/10/18) by the thousands and thousands.

There are small lakes on the property that have a miniature ‘sunflower’ in disturbed areas where there is water. They were just full of monarchs. Started as school teacher, always liked butterfly in the

We had a lot of rain, a dozen lakes, some miles long, lots have ‘sunflowers’ – but otherwise the butterflies were just sitting on the cottonwoods. We don’t have anything that attracts butterflies. We have a lot of regal fritillaries, some buckeyes, but we see very few butterflies so were completely surprised by the monarchs.

There was NO WIND all week which is very unusual for the Sandhills. The butterflies looked fresh, not tattered at all.

Johnstown, NE

Latitude: 42.3 Longitude: -100.1

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