Field Trip: Santa Cruz Monarch Butterflies (haiku)

This Danaus plexippus is vacationing in a valley of
Eucalyptus trees at Natural Bridges State Park in Santa Cruz

Monarch Butterfly

Just a flew months, then you fly

Off to make babies

Monarch butterflies generally leave the Rocky Mountains to visit us in the fall and stay on until February, at which time they return home to their stomping grounds in the Rockies.  You can see them at Natural Bridges State Park in Santa Cruz, as well as Pacific Grove, Carmel, and a few scattered locations that people might tell you about, if you're lucky enough to be let in on the secret.

Another reason to always be nice and friendly!

~ ~ ~

Resources

Natural Bridges State Beach: http://www.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=541

Monarch Butterfly Migration: http://www.monarch-butterfly.com/monarch-migration.html

Fungus Amongus: The Pink Ones Are Toxic

Hiking Windy Hill 

Click on the toxic princess above

to really enjoy the details

But don't touch, 

if you run into  her on a post-rain hike

As was hoped for, we got a bit of those storms the Oregonians were so kind as to send down our way. Two guesses as to what quick crop the rain brings out in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

I chatted with a mushroom gathering fella close to the end of my hike at Windy Hill Open Space Preserve today. You aren't actually supposed to gather mushrooms in the Open Space, but what do you say? My husband saw another couple at the top of the hill with collecting bags as well. Hopefully enough people are concerned about the possibility of eating the wrong 'shroom that the area doesn't get stripped of it's fungus-bearing potential.

This man was gathering mushrooms under an oak tree. I asked him about this pink beauty I'd snapped on my camera phone further up the hill. He knew just the spot she grew.

"Oh those are very toxic," he said in an English thick with a mellifluous some-kinda-European accent I couldn't place. "They are so toxic that if you even touch them with your fingers, the toxins will enter your bloodstream and .... " he made a vague gesture as to where I might now be, had I had the nerve to perhaps prop up this little pink-topped native plant to enhance her photographic possibilities. The location of his casual gesture was somewhere down the side of the trail in a rather steep ravine.

Don't eat the pink ones.