Please report your Red Admiral, Painted Lady, American Lady, and West Coast Lady sightings

[Royce J Bitzer]

Leps-L members,

This message is to announce the ongoing 2008 season of the Vanessa 
Migration Project.  In a way similar to Journey North's Monarch tracking, 
we are mapping seasonal distribution and migration of four Vanessa 
butterflies in North America:

Red Admiral (Vanessa atalanta)
Painted Lady (Vanessa cardui)
American Lady (Vanessa virginiensis)
West Coast Lady (Vanessa annabella)

1. Please report the first date when you see (or have seen) any of these 
butterflies in your area, and the numbers seen that day.

2. Please report any directional migrations of these species that you see 
this year.

3. Please report the presence or abundance of these butterflies later in 
the season.  We encourage multiple observations from the same location.

When sending reports, please include your full name, e-mail address, the 
location from which you observed, and the date or dates when you see these 
butterflies.  For evident directional migrations, also include the 
direction toward which they seem to be moving.  A rough estimate of how 
frequently they are passing through (for example, 10 butterflies over 20 
minutes) would also be helpful, as would notes on
temperature, wind speed and direction, and type and extent of cloud cover.

For more information about this project and how to report your 
observations, see the Red Admiral and Painted Lady Research Site

<http://www.public.iastate.edu/~mariposa/homepage.html>http://www.public.iastate.edu/~mariposa/homepage.html

Once there, select the links, "Help Track the 2008 North American 
Migration" and "How to Report Your Observations."  We are now taking 
observations either directly via e-mail or through our reporting form and 
database.

We also have an interactive map that opens from the map images on our home 
page, as well as complete instructions for viewing and working with the map 
("How to Use Our Interactive Map").

If you have observations from previous years that you would like to share, 
please feel free to send these to us also.  We will add them to our 
database and interactive map.

We would appreciate it very much if you could monitor Red Admirals and 
Ladies this year!  Or pass this message on to others whom you think would 
be interested in our program.

Thank you,


Royce J. Bitzer
mariposa at iastate.edu

The Red Admiral and Painted Lady Research Site
http://www.public.iastate.edu/~mariposa/homepage.html
Territorial behavior, migration, and distribution of Vanessa butterflies 
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