NEVER TO OLD TO LEARN

A person is never too old to learn and this summer was a learning experience for me: butterflies.

Yes, one more post on the Painted Ladies. This is the last one, I promise.

These pictures are the last ones I took before the butterflies were gone, and I was not going to post them. And then I heard something on the news.

At Denver a huge blip showed up on the radar and it was moving against the wind. It turned out to be migrating Painted Lady butterflies and it was 70 MILES across! Yes, 70 miles, not feet or yards. I saw a picture of the radar and those butterflies covered a whole county in Colorado.

It turns out that there was an extra large number of these butterflies this year. I had seen them all over and people in other areas commented on them as well. I don't remember noticing them before this year, and I am closing in on my 75th birthday.

This got me curious about these butterflies so did a little searching. I found that they migrate just like the Monarchs. Thistle is the plant they prefer, and maybe that is why they liked my plant since it is purple too. I don't know if they see color like we do, as I know some animals, insects and birds don't see colors. But my plant is the only one of mine that they fed on here. I did see them on many other kinds of plant in other areas, so assume because there were so many, they had to feed wherever they could find food, even if it wasn't what they preferred. But that is just a guess. There are a lot of thistles in this area, although farmers spray to keep them out of their crops.

Not only are the butterflies gone, but these flowers are drying up and getting ready for winter. They have turned a very dark purple and getting smaller. I just hope they won't be covered in snow for a long time. I am not looking forward to winter coming but it is getting close. We have had a lot more rain than usual already this month and some say that means we will get more than usual amount of snow. We shall see.

All the rain has delayed soybean harvest and the farmers are itching to get in the fields. This fall has not been very pretty so far. Some trees are getting bare already but the pretty colors are hard to find. The leaves are either still green or already gone. In an older post I showed several pretty pictures of all the fall colors and porch displays but I have seen nothing that is nice enough for a picture. How sad.