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Via Flickr:
I hope everyone had a great Christmas! One thing we really wanted to see in Mexico was the Monarch Butterfly migration. It took researchers over 40 years to figure out where the monarchs were going during the winter. For years, they tagged thousands of butterflies but they could never figure out where they went. Finally, they figured out they were going to central Mexico and by serendipidty the researcher found one of his tagged butterflies at this spot. What’s even more amazing is that the first generation flies from Mexico to the US and lays their eggs. The next generation goes even further north into the US and Canada. The third generation then returns to Mexico and the whole cycle starts again. I don’t know how these butterflies know where to go two generations removed!
For this shot, we had to hike up to the top of a steep hill since the butterflies only congregate at a specific altitude on one type of tree. It wasn’t touristy at all - we only saw 2 other tourists the whole day! To really show how many butterflies there were, we decided to take a shot of Evelyn surrounded by the butterflies. They would move so fast that they blurred even at 1/1600th sec. But the blurred action kind of gave the shot a dreamy look.