Teacher Aaron Peck holds a monarch butterfly that flew in the window of his classroom in Oxnard, California. The insect had been tagged by a researcher in Southern Arizona.
/Aaron Peck
By Henry Brean | Arizona Daily Star
A high school teacher in Oxnard, California, received an unexpected visitor from Southern Arizona earlier this month.
On Oct. 17, a monarch butterfly tagged by a researcher near Canelo, Arizona, fluttered through the open window of Aaron Peck’s second-floor classroom and landed on his shoulder, completing a journey that covered at least 535 miles in 28 days.
“It surprised the crap out of me,” the Pacifica High School math teacher said.
And that was before Peck noticed the bright orange sticker, roughly the size of an M&M, on one of the insect’s wings.
He didn’t recognize what it was at first. “It looked like one of those stickers you find on clothes: ‘Inspected by number 4,’” he said.
Or, in this case, number C400.
