Earlier this year I watched as one of the first monarch butterflies circled the milkweed/swan plant below our deck. This time I grabbed a pencil and traced her flow on paper, intrigued at her mysterious path of many careful circuits. The drawing ends up a puzzling maze, as if meant to confuse. My notes read she spends minutes circling and making approaches to the plant, swooping past pumpkins, the mustard seed, the raspberries, the snowball tree, diverting attention? Perhaps checking it’s safe, scenting? It’s a dizzying energetic dance, never still. I trace the lines over and over trying to follow the complicated passage.
Finally, she gingerly lands for moments on the top of the plant before soaring away. I race down to the garden. There is a tiny pale-yellow egg on the underside of a leaf tip. I notice several other eggs that must have been laid earlier and some miniscule caterpillars, perhaps a day old.
Monarch eggs and newly hatched caterpillar
Edge of Things 