A perfect storm of fluttering wings

Last weekend, I found myself inadvertently in the middle of one of Nature's near-inexplicable little miracles. Namely, I was on the high plains in Colorado, standing outside a farmhouse looking at a line of storms, when the air was suddenly filled with butterflies.

Now, I'd noticed a higher-than-normal number of butterflies around for October, but FarmMom said it's been a very wet year, and I wondered if they'd just survived the summer. But when every direction I looked, including up, the air was filled with hundreds of butterflies - I had found, by sheer accident, a butterfly migration path. Monarchs, painted ladies, sulphurs, and one or two cabbage whites, all swirled, danced, and tumbled on the wind in a generally southward cloud.

It was like being inside a swirling windstorm that shook all the leaves off the trees - except there weren't any trees shedding leaves nearby, and these were all flying, flapping, tumbling around each other, alighting on cars and grass and barn and people, even on the rifles. (One poor sulphur was most disappointed to find a taillight, while red, is not a hummingbird feeder full of sugar.)

I've gotten up at 4am and napped while my husband drove to a remote Tennessee corn field to see ultralights leading whooping cranes on their first migration, but I'd never put two and two together and realized I even had a chance to see the butterfly migration.

That was amazing!