Few if any other creatures have to work as hard as they do for their reward than the ephemeral monarch whose journey will take it from toe to tip of this continent in search of milkweed. While milkweed is the monarch’s reward for its thousands of kilometer long flights, milkweed is also disappearing as part of the unintended consequence of agricultural behemoth Monsanto (who also gave us Agent Orange) and its destructive push of herbicides (i.e. Roundup) and herbicide-resistant seeds (i.e. Roundup Ready) … and with it, the monarch is also on a very steep decline. All this makes spying a dancing monarch all the more rewarding on the afternoon of a long hike.
All text and images © Dale Schierbeck
See more of others’ submissions to the Daily Post Weekly Photo Challenge on “Reward.”
Beautiful butterfly, it is always rewarding find insects that survive our human intervention.
Thanks Ben. That’s really nice to hear. I couldn’t agree more — nature is powerful yet so incredibly fragile beneath the feet of humankind.
I am not a photographer so I don’t know the effects you may or may not have used, but this beautiful butterfly looks like it is in a painting. Beautiful art, Dale.
Thanks Jessica. No particular “effects” applied to this photo — but there was a bit of fortune and luck involved in capturing this moment because I had just taken a bunch of pictures of a moving water when the monarch showed up and in my hurry to capture it, I forgot to change the shutter speed and aperture back to ‘normal.’ The result was a series of photos that straddled the line between blurred butterflies and a hyper-realism. I guess that was part of the reward. 🙂
Beautiful picture and such a bummer that yet another species is in danger…
We live in a world filled with beauty and danger alike. Hopefully we can focus on the beauty and chase the danger away ….