BUTTERFLY FACTS
As a kid, I used to believe I could go blind if any of the dust from the wing of the butterflies in my grandmother's garden got from my hands into my eyes. Someone must've told me that fallacy when I was tiny. And believed it up until I was 29 years old. At which point my wife giggles at my ignorance and tells me maybe that would be true for exotic species in the Amazon jungle, but it surely isn't true of the species in Metro Manila!

Which led me to do a little research over the 'Net:

1. Some butterflies are attracted to very specific plants. Similarly some plants attract only one or two butterfly species.

2. Pesticides pose serious dangers to delicate butterflies. Virtually all of the broad-spectrum and systemic chemicals will kill them and so will some otherwise highly recommended biological controls.

3. In a small area in the Transvolcanic Mountains west of Mexico City, millions of monarch butterflies gather each winter-- so many that you cannot see the trees and ground. More spectacular still: there are so many that you can even hear a general noise made by the fluttering of their delicate wings.

4. One monarch was tagged near Ithaca, New York and was recaptured in Virginia eight days later. In that time it had traveled 192 miles. If it flew ten hours a day, arithmetic shows that it maintained an average speed of 2.4 miles per hour, about as fast as a good mountain climber can hike - though rarely for ten hours.

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