Birds and butterflies
 aren't the only critters
 packing up and moving
 in the fall

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Monarch Butterly

When it comes to crowning the coolest animal traveler, even these superbirds may be runners-up. Monarch butterflies, who make warblers look like heavyweights, manage to travel hundreds or even thousands of miles in a complicated migratory family relay race. Monarchs from New England travel to forests in Mexico where they stay the winter.

Monarch Roost

But, unlike the birds, the butterflies that head south in the fall aren't the same ones that return north in the spring. It's like this (imagine yourself as a monarch for a minute): suppose your great-grandparents spent last winter in Mexico then headed north when the weather warmed. They stopped at some nice milkweed plants in Texas and laid their eggs before dying. When your grandparents hatched from these eggs, they too headed north, maybe making it as far as Virginia to lay their own eggs before they died. Then your parents emerged from these eggs and made it up here to New England where they-you guessed it-laid their eggs before dying. Now you emerge on a milkweed sometime in the summer and in the fall-dig this-you get to fly all the way back to those trees in Mexico where your grandparents spent last winter. So now it's your turn.

The whole thing is like giant a cross-country relay race where each new generation takes it a little further. The only problem is, how are you supposed to find Mexico, let alone the right trees on a mountain in Mexico, if you've never been to Mexico before? Scientists suspect that monarchs may use some of the same navigation tools as birds (see How to Get There From Here), but much mystery still surrounds this impressive journey.