Dinner awaits them here:

I love your Viburnum with that luscious fruit hanging off it. It looks a lot like my 'Wentworth' but yours is another variety, isn't it? I just looked up Wentworth to see what the parents were and apparently it was a 'found' cultivar of trilobum. I thought yours was an opulus? Mine has what I thought was a pretty good fruit display until I saw a photo of what can be expected on a 'Wentworth'. But mine is in a pretty good amount of shade, so I'm just happy it produces fruit at all. I didn't realize you could make preserves with them. The birds are slow to eat mine.

We're on the migration route for the Monarchs - they gather near here every fall, waiting for the winds to be right for them to ride the thermals across the lake to continue south. So there are usually lots of monarchs feeding on the heptacodium, the butterfly bushes and the asters here. So far the most we've seen at once is two! We've counted more that 100 in the tree at once in the past! I sure hope this is a temporary setback and some more appear soon...

The viburnum in the picture is indeed an opulus. It produces a nice bunch of fruit which lasts through the winter - apparently the fruit needs a lot of freezing and thawing before it becomes palatable for the birds :-) So it is there for them at the end of winter when there isn't much else around and they can't afford to be too picky! It looks nice in snow so it makes a pretty display for winter.

Apparently Monarch populations crashed last year. The overwintering population for 2012-13 was 58% lower than the lowest year previously recorded, since the scientists discovered the over wintering site in central Mexico (1970 or thereabouts? course the native people knew about it).

I have only seen 1 Monarch all season, finally saw a female yesterday on the butterfly bush. She was probably a migrant, on her way to warmer horizons. It's gotten too cold for them to breed in my immediate area, with nights that are getting down into the 40s F.