BOGONG moths are not as glamorous as monarch butterflies. Their name means “brown” in Dhudhuroa, a now-extinct language once spoken in eastern Australia, where they live. And that is what they are—in contradistinction to a monarch’s glorious orange and black. But drab though they may be, bogongs surely match monarchs in migratory tenacity.
Monarchs, famously, fly across much of North America, starting or ending their journeys in one of a few groves of trees in central Mexico. An adult monarch, though, migrates only once. During their lifetimes, bogong moths that survive to do so will make a pair of 1,000km journeys. One is from their winter birthing grounds in sun-scorched Queensland and New South Wales to a small number of cool caves in the mountains of Victoria where they will spend the summer months resting. The other is back again.
How they find their way to and from these caves is a mystery. But it is less mysterious in light of...Continue reading
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