INWOOD — Uptown residents are aflutter about a recent invasion by Monarch butterflies who have been using Isham Park as a pit stop while on their annual migration south for the winter.
The multicolor-winged beauties have been seen flitting and feasting on the last blossoms of the warm weather, sitting pretty while fueling for the rest of the their nearly 2,500-mile-journey from Canada to Mexico.
“It’s a fall treat,” said Inwood resident Paola Kahn, 43, who said she looks forward to watching the monarchs each year. “They are so graceful and beautiful, they’re a last little reminder of the summer.”
Inwood is not the only neighborhood in New York to enjoy a visit from the insects.
This week, Amy Maxmen, a writer for the magazine Scientific American, reported seeing “dozens of migrating monarch butterflies – glorious kings of the insect world – quivering atop goldenrods on the coast lining Dead Horse Bay in Brooklyn.”
According to Annenberg Learner, an education resource that tracks monarch sightings each year, the butterflies “are in a race against time during fall migration,” because they are cold blooded and “must leave the north before they're trapped by the cold.”
According to the site, monarchs were spotted throughout Manhattan this week, in Central Park, Midtown and along the Hudson River.
“Just watching that small butterfly working so hard to fly south all by itself brought home just how far it has to go and how much it has to work to get there,” wrote one poster on the Annenberg Learner butterfly site “Journey North” after watching a butterfly along the Hudson River.
“I hope it makes it to Mexico.”
