In a post to the maine-birds group today, Jerry Kelly remarked about the "Disneyesque" crowd of monarchs staging at Fort Foster in Kittery around noon. He was estimating well over 500 at the time, but that number surely rose as the day wore on.

I can be confident because when I stepped out for my own lunch-time bird walk the migrating monarchs were so mesmerizing I did a butterfly sit instead.

I marched the mown gap of the Knight Trail from copper beech to copper beech, watching monarchs glide past and making tally marks in my notebook. Near the top of the rise I picked a bench and unpacked my lunch, setting sandwich here and chips there and keeping binoculars and notebook close at hand.

I faced northeast, sun and wind at my back, to spot southbound migrants, counting 90 monarchs in just over an hour. They made good progress despite a stiff southwesterly. Only rarely would one stop.

Also along the ridge were some supersize dragonflies, common green darners, occasional menacing chaperones for the monarchs in their airspace. The patrolling darners' tendency to hover gave me brilliant eyefuls of emerald and turquoise through 10x bins.

Now and again a bird sound came down. Swallows slipped unseen till overhead and going past. I'd twist a bit and give up, balancing lunch and biological monitoring. How many flocks coalesced behind me from the batches of 5, going from nothing in the air to a turmoil of Tachycineta?

Phantasms, insects, and swallows aplenty meant mixups against the blue. I'd catch movement, swing specs into place, and see the wrong thing or nothing at all. I grew tired of spinning around, my potato chips blowing away and the notepad slipping from my thigh. It had been a great sit, but it was time to pack up.

…

On the way back one black odonate came in close, a chilling advance amid the nymphs. I freed the camera and shot from the hip, snagging a series of out-of-focus airshots as leps and odes dipped and dodged in the brisk breeze. My break ended with one more monarch working over a 6-inch milkweed the mower missed.