The Butterflies

For January 3rd (I did at least get the pictures off the camera before midnight) I bring you (thanks again to my 4-photo limit) a three-part post of our day. In these entries the information about each photo will be under the photos.

There they are! The monarchs! See the orange cluster in the middle of the picture? Click on the picture to see it larger. Slipshod will have better photos than this, what with his fancy big camera and lenses and whatnot. But this is what I have from my camera, so I hope it'll do. From all the pictures I've seen of the Monarch stopover along the coast I expected multiple trees to be coated with butterflies, but there were only a couple clusters that I could see. It was warm enough for the butterflies to fly, though, so they were flitting about between the trees, which was neat to see.

The girls, who had been excitedly yelling all day about seeing the butterflies, took a couple looks and then found more exciting things to play with on the ground.

At the end of the trail there was a bigger area of boardwalk where we met a family hanging out, letting their girls run off some steam. Sweet Pea and The Bug joined in and made new friends. On our way back up the boardwalk one of the kids (I think it was Sweet Pea) spotted something off to the side. What's all the fuss?

This poor little creature. At first we just thought we were looking at a butterfly that came down to ground level to see what was going on, but as we watched and saw it slowly flapping we realized that it had only its left wing! All four of the girls in the photo above felt such empathy for the crippled butterfly, it was so sweet to hear them saying how sad they were for it and how they wished they could take it home and care for it, etc.