Painted Lady crossing -- one billion butterflies cross California in an epic migration

[Demovictory9]

https://patch.com/california/fountainvalley/butterfly-crossing-fountain-valley-show-your-butterfly-pics

According to expert Tom Merriman of Butterfly Farms, in a conversation with Pasadena Star News, 1 billion painted ladies are migrating north and will flutter by over the next few weeks as they travel to their breeding grounds in Oregon.

In Orange County, residents chatted up their painted lady stories on social media, discussing seeing clouds of butterflies taking off and zipping around from Baker Ranch to Aliso Viejo.

Residents in Rancho Santa Margarita reported it is hard to drive for not wanting to hit waves of the tiny butterflies. Hundreds of butterflies were seen flying north, up El Camino in San Clemente on Tuesday afternoon.

Butterflies were spotted in Foothill Ranch, Laguna Hills, and Laguna Niguel, and according to readers, they were flying along the immediate coastline.

Link to tweet

The butterfly species Painted Ladies, cousins to the Monarch butterfly, are in a rush to reach breeding areas in Oregon after spending winter in the deserts of northern Mexico, according to Tom Merriman, a director of a butterfly non-profit group in Encinitas, in an interview with the Pasadena Star News. “They’ve laid tons of eggs in the desert, and so there may be over a billion butterflies,” Merriman told the paper.

Social media users in L.A. reported seeing the fluttering insects across the region, from Glendora to the beaches to South-Central L.A. Butterflies floated quickly across Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard in South L.A. from downtown to Leimert Park.

https://www.lataco.com/swarm-billion-painted-lady-butterflies-migrating-socal/