mist-netting for monarchs?

[Clay Taylor]

All -

    Having done a lot of mist netting for birds and raptors, we frequently
had things like Green Darners become entangled.   Extracting them uninjured
was oftentimes impossible.  We never had much problems with butterflies
becoming entangled in mist nets of any mesh size, and I would hazard a guess
that there were two main reasons;

1) Most butterflies, especially Monarchs, travel slowly enough to be able to
detect and avoid the netting before coming in contact with the mesh

2) Their wide wing-structure and low body mass will often enable them to hit
the mesh and bounce back without becoming entangled.   Bird netting relies
on flight speed to drive the subject deep into the "bags" and thereafter
become entangled, while a dragonfly has narrow wings, a long abdomen, and a
big head that all will trap strands of mesh (most dragonfly net mortality
resulted from the head being severed by multiple net strands) when they fly
into the net.

I think mist-netting Monarchs would be more of a hassle than a help.

Clay Taylor
Moodus, CT
----- Original Message -----
From: "Michael Moreno" <w0lverine69 at hotmail.com>
To: <leps-l at lists.yale.edu>
Sent: Thursday, September 14, 2000 2:52 PM
Subject: mist-netting for monarchs?


> We do a lot of mist netting for bats as a part of our research. The
> mist-nets are basically a very large hair-net about the size of a
volleyball
> net (7'X 30'). When mist%20netting, one of the problems that occur is that
> we seem to catch plenty of moths. Now since the monarch migration is on
the
> way I was wondering if anyone ever heard of mist%20netting for monarch? We
> plan to tag as many monarchs that we can get our hands on. Is
mist%20netting
> recommended or discouraged?
>
> Michael Moreno
> Texas Wesleyan University
> Fort Worth, TX
> w0lverine69 at hotmail.com
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