I like watching CBS 60 Minutes on Sunday nights. I have been watching it for many, many years. I seem to always learn something from it every week.

Am I a dedicated, “never miss an episode” kind of watcher? Well, no. Sometimes, especially in the summer, I am busy off doing other things. And some of those shows are repeats in the summer anyway. There was a spell a while back when 60 Minutes was actually 90 minutes long.

But I digress.

I like watching CBS Sunday Mornings show also. That one is automatically recorded at my house each week, so I might be watching Sunday Morning on Sunday night or even Monday or Tuesday night. I always learn something from that show, as well.

I hear 60 Minutes might be taken off the air because the president doesn’t like it, but I like to think it will prevail under the First Amendment’s Freedom of the Press section. At least I hope so.

But I digress once again.

Last week’s 60 Minutes show had three segments and one of those was not very political and was about Monarch butterflies and how they migrate to a certain mountain in central Mexico every winter. Did you see that?

The 60 Minutes reporter even traveled to that mountain in Mexico and hiked up it to see this phenomenon of thousands of Monarchs hanging on the trees there in the evenings and mornings and then filling the area when they flew around in the warm afternoons.

I was fascinated. Mainly because I had seen this phenomenon myself, many times.

Oh, I had not traveled to that mountain in Mexico. I had seen it in my backyard in Tyler, Minnesota. Really.

We had two towering, huge evergreen trees side by side in our backyard. And every year, sometime in September, thousands of Monarchs came and hung out in those trees. Literally hung out, as they hung on every square inch of every branch of both trees, literally covering the entire tree in butterflies with their wings folded up in clusters of rows.

From a short distance you wondered what it was that had filled out the branches of the trees that usually were just pine needles. When visitors came to look, they would gasp when they saw what it was.

Like on 60 Minutes, some of the butterflies fell to the ground. They were not dead, but just resting. Some fluttered around a bit. I had to keep my kids from trying to wake them all up and see them fly around.

I told them to stand still and maybe some would land on them, And sometimes that is exactly what happened.

I am sure they were resting up for the big trip ahead of them to get to Mexico. After a couple days, they took off in a huge flurry of colorful wings. Some years we saw that happen, other years we did not.

Why our backyard? Maybe it was the type of tree. Maybe they remembered from year to year what hospitable hosts we were. To be honest, I never saw them anywhere else in the town of Tyler other than our yard.

And I guess I don’t really know if the Monarch visits are still going on in my previous backyard.

This was not the only migratory event that was happening in our yard back in the day. We had a hedge of elderberry bushes along one side of our backyard. Hedge is a relative word, as it was a row of elderberry bushes that were thick and 10 feet tall, and not a well-trimmed, squared up hedge.

Every year hundreds of cedar waxwing birds filled that row of bushes for several days. I assume it was to load up on food and get ready to migrate south. When I walked in the backyard, one of them might fly out right past the front of my face, and check me out, I assumed.

Again, I had to keep the kids from pestering them and trying to make them fly around. My kids wanted to see them fly and see just how many were in the bushes. The answer to that was, a whole lot of them.

After a couple of days’ visit, they, too, took off. I think their chirping could be translated to “Thanks for the berries, see you next year.”

Here in Blue Earth, we don’t have Monarchs or cedar waxwings in our yard. We have deer. Saw five of them in our yard just the other day. And we live on Main Street, two blocks from downtown.

On the whole, I prefer the butterflies and birds. They didn’t stay long and they don’t eat the bushes in our yard and they don’t poop as much like the deer do.

Although, to be honest, the cedar waxwings did leave a lot of red blotches on our sidewalks, come to think of it.