Our journey into the colors brought us last month to BLUE at Rivertown Revival, a fantastically fun festival celebrating creativity and ingenuity. From drum kits made of gears, pots & pans to art boats on the river, many works of artful utility are created for the revival. We anchored our ship with rebar and brought along our butterflies, set up an aerial rig, and danced our way through Blue River & Sky, and introduced the audience to our local Pipevine Swallowtail Butterfly.

We were honored to have Expandance Director Rachel Wynne as our choreographer for the event. It was a joy to work with her. Our dancers Sam, Rebekah, Tessa and Emily guided us into the vivid world of Blue with fans painted for the occasion. Emily Anglewing, costume designer for the Butterfly Ship, made her debut as an aerialist with a gorgeous performance on silks, to original music by our performing musicians. Guest aerialist Kristen Krup also graced the sky-stage with her own stunningly beautiful dance act in the air! Our musicians Bo, Chris and Brendan and narrator Stefan brought it all to life with song and poetry.

We were featured in the Press Democrat & Argus Courier, and we also took a whole bunch of our own photos. We'd love to share some of them with you here. Thank you to the volunteer crew of Rivertown Revival for hosting us!

Follow the nectar! The Monarch Butterfly survives on milkweed and flowers, and navigates thousands of miles via a sun compass...

Our leaders inspire us, and for those aboard The Butterfly Ship, this is role of the monarch butterfly. The name stems from the Greek monos ‘alone’ and arkein ‘to rule’; although the beauty of these butterflies may give them an air of regality, it was their bright orange color that inspired English and Dutch settlers in North America to name them after their ruler, King William, who was also Prince of Orange. In our magical story “The Butterfly Ship” the monarch encourages us to voyage.

The ship is followed by butterflies of all kinds, but principal among these is monarchs, for they are migrators. Of all 20,000+ species of butterflies in the world, the monarch is the greatest traveller: it migrates distances spanning 2500 miles, with each tiny creature flying on average 20-30 miles per day, and some days flying more than 150 miles! The current theory that monarchs navigate by a 'sun compass’—keeping accurate track of the time of day relative to the position of the sun—makes them fitting characters to follow a ship that sails through the Light Spectrum on its way to the Sun.

Monarchs’ wings are marked by a beautiful pattern of brilliant orange shapes contrasted with black outlines and dusted with tiny white dots at its edges. It is a sight to behold when large populations of monarchs in North America migrate annually to specific trees in either Mexico or California. Barbara Kingsolver describes the view in her novel Flight Behavior:“The forest blazed with its own internal flame...Brightness of a new intensity moved up the valley in a rippling wave, like the disturbed surface of a lake. Every bough glowed with an orange blaze.”

Butterflies born on milkweed plants will munch their way into adulthood, and then fly northward in successive generations (as a butterfly, they live 2-6 weeks) throughout the summer. But the final generation of the summer is different—they live an impressive 8-9 months! They accomplish this marvelous feat by delaying their maturity into adulthood: this helps them reserve enough energy to fly south for the winter and stay there until the temperatures warm.

To fuel their long journeys, these butterflies depend on the existence of “nectar corridors,” so they can sip energy-giving nectar from plants that bloom at just the right time along their paths. Monarch caterpillars rely on stands of native milkweed: this plant supplies them the bitter compound that make these butterflies unpalatable to predators. It is on milkweed that monarch caterpillars dine exclusively, and it is here the butterflies choose to lay their eggs. Milkweeds themselves depend on monarchs and other insects to bring pollen from one flower to another; for this service their flowers offer nectar as a reward.

In the past two decades, monarch habitat has dwindled with more widespread application of herbicides on agricultural land, the logging of host trees in Mexico, shifting climate lines and more frequent storms due to climate change. Monarch populations in the late 1990s and 2000s plummeted by alarming rates—an over 80% decline from a 21-year average—and so humans have taken up the quest to revive monarch habitat (native species of milkweed, host trees on which to overwinter, and nectar plants). Due to these habitat building efforts, and some good weather, monarch numbers have increased a little in 2016.

The Butterfly Ship will soon be hosting a journey into the color GREEN (date and place to be announced). You can help us to plant a stand of native milkweed (in Sonoma County two native species are Narrow-Leafed and Showy Milkweed), and also enjoy a performance of outdoor dance, music and storytelling.

The Press Democrat captured this photo of the Butterfly Ship floating down the streets of Petaluma for the annual Butter & Egg Days Parade! We had an amazing time! See more photos here.

We're so excited to float down the streets of Petaluma in our magical ship at the Butter & Egg Days Parade. The parade starts at noon, but be sure to leave plenty of time for parking on this crowded day! Here are some photos of our float creation: