A Rare Sighting

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A Rare Sighting
A British Columbia observer wrote on Sunday: "I was excited to see my very first Monarch butterfly here in the Southern Interior of British Columbia, Canada. I saw a large orange butterfly flying around. When I zoomed in with my camera I realized it was a monarch. A rare sighting in our area, it is the first one that I have ever seen."

This monarch is likely part of the western population that overwinters along the California coast. The western population is much smaller than the eastern population that overwinters in Mexico. Numbers fluctuate, but there are 100 to 1,000 times more monarchs in the eastern population. The Rocky Mountains are considered to be the boundary between the two populations. However, there is intermixing and the two populations are gentically identical.

June 16, 2013 Peachland, British Columbia