Date: 09/25/2018

Number: 20

I put "20" because truth is I lost count right about there. A windy cold front came through and so did a bunch of monarchs at high altitude with a few gliding lower. One folded its wings, dropped like a rock then double-backed to check out the flowers in the yard. While this was going on, I got 2 such visitors.

In a nutshell, what happened during the course of the day is that a few monarchs had shown up to nectar in the morning and then seemed to have disappeared completely the nearer to noon it got. The wind started to pick up from the north about mid-afternoon, 3pm-ish, and that's when I started to monitor the skies overhead (I first witnessed this type of event last year and my hunch was based on last year's experience).

The ones I could spot came at a rate of about 1 every couple minutes, but that accelerated to one every minute, and at peak it was one every 45 seconds-ish and their rate of travel had accelerated to the point of being too quick to allow my camera to focus. "Flying as fast as the wind" would be a literal accurate description. The number of minutes I watched were non-contiguous and I didn't keep track of exactly how many those were. I watched on and off from mid-afternoon til dusk, something like 7 or 7:30-ish pm.

In the afternoon, after watching long enough to develop a bit of a crick in my neck, I went to my computer and posted notice of the event in progress in a Facebook Group called Oklahoma Friends of Monarchs, where reports elsewhere in Oklahoma of this event were posted and the Admin urged everyone to report those sightings to Journey North and I'm sure they did just that. It's worthwhile to mention again that the meteorologist at OKC TV station KFOR showed radar that detected the front which is supposed to detect just precipitation and he explained that the radar image wasn't precipitation but "birds and bugs". It's reasonable to infer that the monarch migration event did show up on weather radar. :)

This picture is of the nectaring area in the front yard the morning of the same day the event occurred.

Enid, OK

Latitude: 36.4 Longitude: -97.9

Observed by: Diane
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