Subject: Monarchs in the United Kingdom

From: Patrick Roper <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 23 Mar 1995 10:33:44 GMT

It is interesting to read about the experiences of American lepidopterists
with the Monarch butterfly.  In Britain the species is a very rare migrant
and cannot survive here as we have no indigenous Milkweed (and very little
cultivated).

Last summer one of the members of Butterfly Conservation was on the coast of
south west England when a Monarch butterfly flew over a sand dune and landed
on a flower at his feet.  He took one of the few photographs we have of the
species wild in England.

One likes to think it had made it right across the Atlantic, though it could
have escaped from a butterfly house or come up from southern Spain or the
Canaries.  The location though rather favours the trans-Atlantic route.

Patrick Roper
Editor: Butterfly Conservation News
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