In a few weeks, the back fence by the elementary school with be a place where migrants gather themselves before they leave. The fence is popular because of its temperature and the protection it offers. The sun hits the fence from mid-morning until late afternoon in May, and so many years of sun has turned what must have once been dark wood into a faded gray. But the fence also has a line of horizontal two-by-fours about a third of the way to the top, which seems to be the ideal combination of warmth and shelter for monarch caterpillars.
I’d like to think, too, that the fence has a special energy, a border that is already attuned to small creatures who navigate the world on wonder and sugar. In May, going to school seems like less of a drag, so close to summer, than a metamorphosis watch. Each day, another pale green caterpillar finds a place along the wood from which to dangle itself in the shape of the letter J. By afternoon, it has become a pale green chrysalis flecked with gold.
While inside, these caterpillars are taking on the shape of their leaving, other arrivals surround us. Last week, I arrived at the beach to find the surface dotted with bubbles the size of a child’s hand. Out in the water, the bubbles transformed into sails. The blue-bodied Velella velella, or by-the-wind sailors, hovered in the cove on a calm day, with each waves nudging them closer to shore.
Many of them have now made landfall. Yesterday morning, on the walk to school, we found one sitting in the grassy median a quarter-mile from the ocean. Its sails aren’t meant for flight. Had a bird helped it along? Maybe it seemed like an easy meal, stranded on the shore. Their toxins are enough for the plankton they eat, and maybe enough to make them unappealing to potential predators, too.
However it arrived, this sailor seemed like a piece of blue morning magic under gray skies. The monarchs are another. Each day, we watch their chrysalises as they darken and then grow translucent, so that you can see the intricate wings inside. Once the butterflies push their way out into the air, they will tune themselves to magnetic fields and environmental cues and start their leg of the journey north. We do not know whether these caterpillars along the fence are the offspring of monarchs who overwinter here, or in the middle of the relay chain of monarchs that make migrate from Mexico, one generation at a time.
The monarchs seem to know that the best time to emerge in the quiet that happens on the playground when all the kids are still in class, or the one that descends after the last bell has rung for the day and everyone has gone home. Our beloved crossing guard, who arrives in the quiet, too, has taken photos of the monarchs when they just break free. I imagine each one coming out surprised and blinking the thousands of lenses in their compound eyes.
Each spring, he posts his photos of the monarchs along the sun-warmed fence so that even if we miss the moment of their departure, we can remember them long after they are gone.
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Images: Chris Cottrell (monarch), Cameron Walker (by-the-wind sailor).