The last few weeks…  Well, they’ve been really busy.  REALLY busy.  I am rather happy when I get to sleep at a decent hour so I can get up early the next morning and start another long day full of many, many activities.  It’s fun and I absolutely love my job, but the busy schedule has been interfering with my blogging schedule something fierce!  Tonight I finally had time to sit down and write my third year-end report for my dragonfly swarm data only to realize that I’d left all the notes I’ve been working on for weeks in a bag I intentionally left at work!  Hopefully I’ll get that report online tomorrow.  In the meantime, here’s a photo that I took of an exhibit at the museum where I work that’s sort of related, insofar as this is another insect that makes a massive migration along about the same paths as the dragonflies each year:

Monarchs

These aren’t live monarchs (which would be SO cool), but the exhibit is representative of what the overwintering sites in Mexico look like at this time of year.  All those monarchs are sitting down there now, millions of them in the oyamel trees in only a handful of locations in Mexico.  They’ll start heading north in a few short months.  It’s such an amazing biological spectacle!  I really hope I get to see the overwintering grounds in person someday.  From all the photos and all the video I’ve ever seen of these places, I know it would be a life changing, miraculous experience that I would never forget.

If you haven’t heard about it yet, there’s an IMAX 3D movie out now called Flight of the Butterflies that documents the annual migration of the monarchs.  It is supposed to be superb, so I am hoping I’ll be able to catch it at the local IMAX theater before it is ousted in favor of something newer.  Has anyone seen it yet?  I’d love to hear some reviews if you have!

Here’s hoping I’ll get the third part of the report up tomorrow!  If I could only remember to bring my notes home…

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