It's been an off year for butterflies here, but over the past week it seems that there's been a good end of season brood. We've released a dozen this week and yesterday, there were 5-10 monarchs on the tithonia in our garden throughout the day. We still have a few hummingbirds passing through and they have issues with the monarchs all over the tithonia









Bud
Southwest Ohio
USDA Plant Zone 6a

Camera: Pentax K20D
Lens: Pentax DA*300 f/4, Sigma 180 f/3.5 Macro
There's 1 or 2 more hummingbird / butterfly pics located here...
http://www.pbase.com/budohio

Hello Bud,

Wow! What a great collection of pics!!! I was going to start a thread yesterday about the Monarch Migration. I posted my sightings on the 19th of recording 87 passing through from north to south over our fenceline and into our gardens in a 3 hour span from 2-5pm. Last year it was on the 24th. We had a big cold front move through early on the 20th.
On the 20th, the winds were out of the SSW at between 15-25 mph. There were some Monarchs moving through, but only about 5-6 an hour...fighting head winds and getting torn on our butterfly bushes...poor things. Yesterday I don't think I saw 10 from noon to 6pm. It was a chilly afternoon. Today I only saw 3 Monarchs all day. It's supposed to warm up on the 23rd and 24th to be in the low 70's, but I believe this year it was early. It seems that everything has been happening 5-10 days earlier than last year.
Our hummers arrived 10 days early, Sparrows started flocking almost 2 weeks early, our 1st Orchard Oriole passed through 8 days early...for examples.
Seems like we're in for an early and cold winter this year!

Susan Louise
from Branford CT/ live in Lincoln NE
Zone 5

Those are some amazing shots! Spectacular, to say the very least...thank you so much for sharing. That last one, btw, should be on the homepage...

How amazing seeing a humming bird want to take a share of nectar from a monarch!
There are no humming birds in Taiwan...