I’ve always really liked butterflies. As a young kid one of my favorite science projects in school was the hands-on metamorphosis lab. The teacher hung a mesh net filled with plants that contained eggs. In the first days the eggs hatched and the caterpillars ate the plants. In a few weeks the caterpillars entered the chrysalis stage and a week or so later they emerged as butterflies.
Besides the butterfly’s cool life cycle, it’s also the name of my best stroke in swimming and something I briefly considered getting tattooed on my shoulder. It was a swim team unity thing during my senior year in college. Fortunately, our coach talked us out of it and we ended up getting earrings – hey it was the ‘80s and earrings and tattoos were a little more risqué then.
One of my goals with the Misaligned series was to incorporate history and science into the story. When I read about the monarch butterfly’s amazing migration, I knew it was something I could use. While the misalignment part is a bit of author’s license, the rest of it is accurate.
Excerpt from Penny Preston and the Raven’s Talisman
Penny let out a heavy sigh.
Mr. Myrdin nodded. “Your misalignment doesn’t make you evil. It may be rare in humans, but there are quite a few animals that are misaligned, too.”
“Really? Which ones?”
“At the first frost, the monarch butterflies in New York migrate to the Mariposa Monarca Biosphere Reserve in Mexico.”
“That’s a long trip for a butterfly.”
“Yes. The migration takes three generations of butterflies to complete. Perhaps even more remarkable than that, the generation that reaches Mexico lives four times longer than its forebears before it starts the return trip north. The entire migration requires seven generations to finish. Each butterfly flies to a place it has never seen before. That would be like you returning to your Great-great-great-great-grandmother’s house without ever having been there.”
“Is that where their misalignment comes in?”
“Indeed, it’s a very basic extra-dimensional capability, but it allows them to follow an unseen flight path along their migration route.”
“That’s nice, but unless the Monarchs can help me learn to close portals, it doesn’t really help.”
“That’s true, but there are other misaligned animals that can help.”
“Please tell me unicorns are real and you’ve got one waiting for me.”
“Oh, they’re real, but sadly, no one has seen one in ages. But have you ever wondered why witches are associated with swamps?”
That’s all that made it into the first book, but the monarchs have a more prominent role in the sequel, Penny Preston and the Silver Scepter. Below are a few links for more information about Monarch Butterflies, including some of the latest experiments on how they complete their amazing migration.
Thanks for reading.
Armen
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Please visit the Misaligned tab on my website for more information about the series.
Additional information on Monarch butterflies:
Butterflies in your playground (Special thanks to Elliot for this link)
Creating a Pollinator Garden (Special thanks to Corrine & Michelle Bass)
DA, thanks for comments. I appreciate you taking the time to read my blog and hope you return for future posts.
I’ll pull up and send on a spectacular monarch picture … we had perhaps 20 or more visit our perennial bed during what we quickly assumed was a migration. I need to crank up the older computer and look for it. BTW: Sarah C. found your work very interesting. Regards …
Thanks for making the connection to space travel. Maybe you could work that into a story either with humans or our first contact with a pupating species that builds multi-generational ships.
Awesome! I never knew that the migration was multi-generatiional. It makes me think that, someday, some brave families from the human species will leave Earth to connect with our counterparts somewhere out in space. Maybe their children’s children will actually meet them.