{"id":22053,"date":"2016-02-07T00:11:09","date_gmt":"2016-02-07T08:11:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.seecalifornia.com\/traveltips\/?p=22053"},"modified":"2016-02-07T01:45:48","modified_gmt":"2016-02-07T09:45:48","slug":"see-butterflies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.seecalifornia.com\/traveltips\/see-butterflies\/","title":{"rendered":"See Butterflies"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"alignnone\" src=\"http:\/\/www.seecalifornia.com\/images\/btrefly.jpg\" alt=\"img\" width=\"650\" height=\"339\" \/><\/p>\n<p>A Monarch butterfly flew up to the window where I sat\u00a0and clung to the screen\u00a0for quite some time. I&#8217;d heard\u00a0claims that butterflies can\u00a0represent after-death communication and sure enough, my mother had just passed away. Coincidence? Maybe&#8230; but the truth is that butterflies are among nature&#8217;s most beautiful and inspiring insects. They only live a short time (several\u00a0weeks\u00a0or\u00a0months) and sadly, many species are in decline.\u00a0One\u00a0such butterfly was celebrated during California Western Monarch Day on Feb. 6.<\/p>\n<p>According to a report released on Feb. 4, 2016 volunteers tallied\u00a0271,924 overwintering Monarch butterflies\u00a0in California at\u00a0187 sites &#8212; not\u00a0significantly different than last year\u2019s count, and this year\u2019s population estimate represents a 39% decline from the long term average. The number is a fraction of the 1.2 million Monarchs recorded in the late 1990s. With\u00a0dozens of opportunities to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.seecalifornia.com\/festivals\/california-butterflies.html\">see butterflies in California<\/a>\u00a0at\u00a0butterfly gardens and\u00a0special events, you may be inspired to help them survive through simple acts such as planting milkweed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A Monarch butterfly flew up to the window where I sat\u00a0and clung to the screen\u00a0for quite some time. I&#8217;d heard\u00a0claims that butterflies can\u00a0represent after-death communication and sure enough, my mother had just passed away. Coincidence? Maybe&#8230; but the truth is that butterflies are among nature&#8217;s most beautiful and inspiring insects. They only live a short [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[29],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.seecalifornia.com\/traveltips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22053"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.seecalifornia.com\/traveltips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.seecalifornia.com\/traveltips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.seecalifornia.com\/traveltips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.seecalifornia.com\/traveltips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22053"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.seecalifornia.com\/traveltips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22053\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.seecalifornia.com\/traveltips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22053"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.seecalifornia.com\/traveltips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22053"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.seecalifornia.com\/traveltips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22053"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}