Wheeled Migration: Trucker Transports Injured Butterfly

[Teacher Mark 53]

A trucker from Alabama recently performed an unusual mission of mercy involving a monarch butterfly.

The trucker was at Scotty’s truck stop north of Albany, NY, when Jeannette Brandt walked in with a cardboard box and asked if any of the truckers were headed south. In the box was a monarch butterfly with a broken wing, which Brandt discovered along a biking trail.

She’d gone online and found how to mend the wing with a spot of contact cement and tiny cardboard splints. She fed it a honey-and-water solution along with pear juice.

Brandt says the trucker, whose name she didn’t catch, not only gave the monarch a ride to Florida, but called to report the outcome.

“He was going to Florida, and he said when he got to Northern Florida the temperature was about 70 degrees,” Brandt told Land Line Now. “So he found a nice swampy area, and there were wild flowers growing there. He thought that would be a good spot. … He said, ‘You know, it took a few minutes, but it got going and it flew away.’ ”

With any luck, the monarch is now winging its way to central Mexico, where hundreds of millions of monarchs spend their winters at almost exactly the same spot year after year.

– By Staff Writer Reed Black

reed_black@landlinemag.com

http://www.landlinemag.com/todays_news/Dai...8/112408-07.htm

[Niels Bohr 72]

What about the hundred of bugs that splattered onto the grill of his trucks, or bumper? Why aren't they saved?

[Teacher Mark 53]

What about the hundred of bugs that splattered onto the grill of his trucks, or bumper? Why aren't they saved?

That's pretty much what I was thinking. "After successfully transplanting the butterfly the story took a turn for the worse when another Semi, driven by Rufus Boggess of Conway, Arkansas, added the butterfly to the enormous collection located on his grill"!

[almaty 19]

monarch butterfly, ftw!