Seeing a monarch butterfly
A monarch drifting south in fall is often a traveler bound for the mountains of Mexico, on a route its great-grandparents flew. The sight points to the paths you follow without a guide.
What it may mean
A monarch flying south in September has never been to Mexico. Neither have its parents or grandparents, each of which lived just a few summer weeks. Yet this late-summer generation, which can live for months, flies up to a few thousand miles and finds the same patches of high fir forest used the winter before. It seems to steer by the sun and an inner clock, perhaps helped by the earth's magnetic field. Nobody leads it; the way is built in. That makes a monarch a fitting sign for the routes you follow that nobody taught you directly: a family way of handling hard times, a pull toward a certain kind of work, a place you feel drawn back to. Some inherited paths lead somewhere good. In Mexico, where monarchs spend the winter, many families give them a significance of their own.
Depending on how you saw it
A monarch drifting south in early fall
From late August into October, monarchs move steadily southward, stopping at flowers to refuel and gathering at night in trees. The traveler you see may be hundreds of miles into its trip. What journey are you on that started long before you joined it?
A monarch laying eggs on milkweed
Monarch caterpillars eat only milkweed, and the plant's bitter toxins stay in their bodies and make the adult butterflies distasteful to birds. The bright orange is a warning. Which hard thing you absorbed early now helps protect you?
Monarchs around the Day of the Dead
Monarchs reach their winter forests in Michoacán and the State of Mexico around November 1 and 2. Among the Purépecha and Mazahua peoples of that region, many hold the belief that the butterflies are the souls of ancestors returning for the Day of the Dead. Whose return would you most like to mark this fall?
An orange butterfly that is not quite a monarch
The viceroy looks almost the same but has an extra black line across its hind wings, and it is also unpleasant to eat. Two species share one warning. Who shares your colors and your cause, even if you have never met?
Why it happens in nature
Monarchs born in late summer enter a long-lived state and migrate from eastern North America to oyamel fir forests in central Mexico, while western monarchs winter on the California coast. They seem to steer by the sun with an internal clock. Caterpillars feed only on milkweed and store its toxins, which makes the adults distasteful to many predators.
To reflect on
Which path in your life did you inherit rather than choose, and is it still taking you where you hope to go?