Date: 09/08/2019

Number: 500000

Submitted by Don Davis. Ed and Barb Poropat are well known Ontario naturalists. Exact number moving through the park this day is very difficult to determine, but I would suspect that the number probably exceeded 500,000 to one million for the entire day:

"There was a spectacular movement of Monarchs through Presqu’ile Provincial Park, just south of Brighton, Ontario, on September 8th. Tens of thousands rested along the west beach in windy, cloudy conditions during the afternoon,and many thousands more congregated in the willow trees/pannes to escape the cool wind. I have seen many Monarchs on the move this fall, but nothing comes close to the spectacle yesterday afternoon. We literally walked through a blizzard of butterflies, at times.

At one point, we scanned with a scope over the lake and observed hundreds of Monarchs moving slowly north along the shoreline, many quite far out, but the amazing part was gazing upward! We stopped to look at a passing hawk, and realized the sky above us was also full of migrating butterflies. You would move the focus dial on your binoculars and see layers and layers of migrating butterflies; hundreds of them, as far up as you could see. Almost all were moving slowly but deliberately N or NW toward the Lake Ontario shoreline west of the peninsula. It was truly an awesome sight to witness!

Although it was impossible to capture the total spectacle with an iphone, (of course, no camera!), I did manage a digiscoped photograph to give a taste of what we observed (photo taken with a cell phone pointed into a scope).

Cheers,

Ed and Barb Poropat
Haliburton, ON

Brighton, ON

Latitude: 44 Longitude: -77.7

Observed by: Donald A.
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