All aflutter

A last little trip before we head back to New York took us back to the central California coast. I'd been hearing for a few months that the monarch butterflies, whose numbers had plummeted almost to nothing in recent years, were on a rebound, so we checked out the Pismo Beach Monarch Butterfly Grove. I don't know what it was like when the monarchs here numbered in the tens and even hundreds of thousands, but this was quite a throng. They gad about high in a copse of eucalyptus trees 

(hence the graininess of my image), settling to rest in dense bunches to reduce wind exposure. Seeing them, my body stretched and arced to see them, made me deliriously happy. Butterflies are miracles all the time, but the precarious status of this community of North American monarchs, with their unbelievable migrations, sits at the center of Donna Haraway's "Camille Stories," a crucial text in my Anthropocene Humanities course, so it was especially glorious!!