Four Wings and a Prayer Read online

  “Striving to find out what animals really do in nature is a far more noble pursuit than trying to ‘prove’ that they do what we might wish them to do,” Adrian Wenner wrote in a memo dated September 25, 1997, and addressed to “Those Interested in Monarch Butterfly Biology.” Although nominally commenting on the sun-compass experiment, Wenner was registering a much larger complaint. He did not accept the conventional wisdom; he did not believe that monarch butterflies migrated. He knew that the eastern population moved southward in the fall. He knew that much of the western population moved toward the coast at around the same time. But he refused to accept that in either case the movement was intentional. Intent, he believed, was a human attribute. So was wanting the story of the monarch butterfly to be more dramatic than it really was.

  Wenner’s own explanation of the southward movement of eastern monarchs each fall went like this: “In the fall, monarch adults in Canada and the upper Midwest likely receive some environmental trigger (change in photoperiod or seasonal cold snap) and cease egg laying. When the main jet stream moves south out of Canada, high and low pressure cells become carried across extreme southern Canada and later across the U.S. At that time, monarchs need merely rise on thermals during clearing conditions and become carried toward the south out of the region in which they were reared. If they have reached sufficient altitude in their ride on thermals, the north winds can carry some of them considerable distances toward Mexico.” The reason they all seemed to end up in the same place in Mexico, Wenner argued, was simple: Monarchs were found in the overwintering sites because that was where people expected to find them. In other words, they might be in other places as well, but the world was big, and who was looking?

  D-PLEX, where this discussion and the one about the sun compass and those about the effect of logging on the Mexican habitat and anything else concerning monarchs took place, was another of Chip Taylor’s inventions. There were eighteen messages posted in December 1995, the first month the site was in business. Less than four years later, in September 1999, there were eight hundred. There seemed to be no end to the controversies, the information, and the queries. Chip Taylor stayed in the background as much as possible, letting other personalities dominate, but then he would appear, fielding questions, noting unusual recoveries of tagged butterflies (in Cuba, Ireland, the Bahamas), and refereeing the fights that swept through the group now and then like the flu. (“Here’s a classic example of a double standard in the butterfly community,” a professional butterfly breeder named Rick Mikula wrote in October 1997: “butterflies transported from Michigan to Texas, which everyone will think is cute because children were involved. However, were these butterflies infected with anything? Who knows? But when a professional butterfly breeder rears butterflies under laboratory conditions, eliminating any sick stock, [he’s a] bad [person]. Under the current double standard no one turns their head when a nine-year-old releases what could be the most infected monarch at the roosting site, but [everyone] screams when someone takes their time and does it right.” Soon afterward Lincoln Brower weighed in, directing his reply to Chip Taylor but posting it for all to see: “Rick Mikula’s e-mail message on the interchanges of monarchs borders on a lack of civility and does not advance intelligent discourse on what is a legitimate debate about the wisdom (or lack thereof) in making artificial transfers of monarch butterflies between different geographic areas in North America.” “I truly hope you did not find my response as uncivil as Dr. Brower did,” Mikula wrote back. “I did not mean it to be.… The question I posed still puzzles me. I am all for kids’ releasing butterflies, but it seems the professionals always get a bad rap. But I must say after that blasting from Dr. Brower it will certainly be the last time I respond to a posting on the list.” It wasn’t.)

  The migration—if that was what it was—was tracked in a haphazard but engaging way, with people all over the country reporting when they had seen their first spring monarch, or when the fall monarchs were passing through, and in what numbers. There was an exclamatory feeling, passed like a torch from writer to writer as the monarchs moved north, or west, or south: First Texas Sighting! First Monarch to Reach Canada! Monarchs Clustering in Pacific Grove! Monarchs Leave El Rosario! And nobody seemed to tire of it, not even Adrian Wenner, tending his garden in Santa Barbara. “I continue to maintain that we actually know little about the remarkable migration phenomenon,” he wrote in September 1997, in a message that challenged, yet again, the sun-compass theory. “In the meantime, all stages of monarch caterpillars continue to ravage the milkweed plants in our yard and the females continue to oviposit.”

  Aberrations were noted, too, as when someone observed a monarch butterfly mating with a queen butterfly. Or when, in mid-November 1997, Don Davis wrote that he had “received a report from a relative today that in the northwest end of metropolitan Toronto … he observed a monarch, with wings opened, sunning on the south side of his garage. I might be a bit skeptical of this report, except that I know this gentleman well and I know that he knows what a monarch looks like.”

  “Thanks to all the taggers,” Chip Taylor addressed the group two days later. “Your efforts have once again produced some interesting data. And thanks to all those who have been so gracious as to track us down or send us the information on the tagged butterflies they encountered.… Some interesting patterns have emerged. One of these patterns has to do with the relationship between direction and distance. Nearly all long distance flights are south or southwest, but shorter flights show greater variation in direction.”

  LATE FALL AND early winter were always a quiet time on D-Plex. It was as if the participants, like the butterflies, were in a state of creative diapause, conserving their thoughts and attention for the remigration a few months off. The excitement of being part of the long-distance relay race as the monarchs swept south from Canada to Mexico was, for the time being, over. In October 1997 there were some three hundred messages on D-Plex. The next month there were only about a hundred. It was the same in December. Don Davis offered his “Odds and Ends” a few times, and there was the usual chatter: discussions about monarchs in Florida and tips on buying milkweed at Home Depot and a message from someone in Warsaw alerting everyone to a movie on monarchs that would be airing on Polish TV.

  From Mexico, however, almost nothing was heard, and almost no one was writing about what was going on there, either. It was as if the butterflies, having reached their winter home, were now safely in their beds, asleep, and not to be disturbed. But that, of course, was not at all what was happening. Although their metabolisms had slowed, and though their reproductive systems were temporarily shut off, the monarchs were not hibernating. They spent a surprising amount of time in the air, playing what looked like a child’s game: sunbathing in the trees until a cloud drew a curtain on that warmth, then rushing madly skyward, flapping. The sound of their wings was startling then, like spontaneous clapping. It erupted, and arced, and fell away. Most of the time, though, the monarchs were huddled on tree trunks and branches, one upon the next until the bark was no longer visible. They were waiting: waiting for the days to lengthen, for the temperature to rise, for their biological clocks to start ticking loudly again.

  NEAR THE END of December a cold front moved through Mexico, and there was some concern voiced on D-Plex that the butterflies might have been affected. Since so many monarchs were clustered in such a small place, cold weather posed a danger, not only to individual monarchs but to the population at large. Chip Taylor posted a calming message three days before Christmas. Yes, it had been cold, he said, but not to worry: the monarchs were fine. “Mortality can be severe however when snowfall is followed by cold rain and then freezing conditions,” he wrote. “Long periods (a week or more) of cold, rainy weather appear to have the strongest impacts on the monarchs. The monarchs can’t move under these conditions and many become ‘waterlogged’ (wetted) and fall to the ground where they usually die (or are eaten by mice). I don’t have all the literature availabl
e but the most severe mortality attributable to a particular weather event I was able to find occurred in 1981 (and not ‘83, the time of the last major El Niño). Even though the mortality was extreme, 80 percent of the butterflies survived this event. Perhaps Bill Calvert could provide more information on this and other causes of extreme mortality at the roost areas.”

  Two weeks later he did. Calvert was back in Mexico, at the Chincua and El Rosario sanctuaries, and the news was less reassuring. “It rained hard on Saturday, January 18th,” he reported. “Tuesday was partly cloudy and cold. Wednesday not a cloud was in the sky and the butterflies did perform! The Rosario colony was quite high, still above the Llano de los Canejos. That’s about equivalent to the top of the loop, the same level as the very top of the trail system, but over to the left about 200 yards. It’s a kilometer-and-a-half walk to the colony. At this colony we found evidence of many butterflies knocked down from their clusters by the weekend storm. To get to the colony at Chincua you walk about three-quarters of a kilometer down from the Mojonera Alta where we found evidence of moderate to heavy mortality due to the mid-December storm. The colony that was in position near the Mojonera Alta had moved. Only a few weakened butterflies were evident among piles of dead ones.”

  Soon after Bill Calvert wrote this, Chip Taylor and Sandra Perez made the trip to El Rosario themselves. “One observer told me he had seen piles of dead monarchs up to two feet deep near the top of the ridge at Chincua,” Taylor wrote, noting that the local guides there were reporting that the numbers of monarchs appeared to be down from the year before. Taylor, however, was unconvinced. Population size was always difficult to assess, he said, especially when butterflies were spread across a large area, as they were that winter. He was sanguine. The monarchs looked good, winter was nearly over, five tagged butterflies had been found already, and he had seen a mating pair overhead, a sure sign of spring and of the remigration to come.

  A few days later it seemed that this “all clear” might have been premature. David Marriott, who ran the Monarch Project, a California-based monarch education program, was also in Angangueo, helping a film crew make an IMAX documentary on the butterflies, and he called Chip Taylor in Lawrence; Taylor relayed his observations to D-Plex: “The overnight lows at the top of the mountain appear to be lower than normal due to the lack of overcast on most nights. Patches of ice and frost are common each morning. Some of the monarchs visiting seeps to get moisture late in the day are evidently becoming too cold to return to the trees and many appear to be dying from exposure overnight.… Local residents claim that this is the driest year in memory.”

  I was away when these messages were posted, and so I read them later as a group, archivally, without the distractions of watching them unfold in real time, though my mind wandered to Contepec and the horses, and how they had been unable to get any purchase because the ground was so dry. It seemed only natural to find a note from Betty Aridjis, Homero Aridjis’s wife, in this stack of mail. A fire had broken out in the mountains we had climbed, destroying hundreds of acres of forest. “The two areas which burned were on the Contepec, Michoacán, side,” Betty said, “precisely the place where monarchs had arrived in November, although they [had] quickly abandoned the mountain as there was a dearth of water in the area due to a severe summer drought, and on the Temascalcingo, Mexico, side, an area behind the Llano de la Mula.” It was believed that the blaze had been started by a campfire gone out of control. “Lincoln,” Betty Aridjis wrote to Lincoln Brower, though she had addressed her note to no one in particular, “remember that on our visit to the Llano de la Mula we saw the remains of several apparently recent campfires?” I remembered, too.

  IT WAS MONTHS before anyone tried to put the pieces together—to make sense of the anecdotal reports, to fit them together. Even Chip Taylor in Lawrence, the man with all the pieces, was having trouble. “What happened to all those fall monarchs that were seen heading toward Mexico?” he asked in the 1997 season summary. “Did they make it? It’s hard to tell.… Perhaps many of the monarchs didn’t make it to Mexico or died shortly after their arrival. I visited El Rosario on 14 November.… The number of monarchs in the air and in the trees was spectacular but as a biologist I couldn’t take my eyes off the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of dead and dying monarchs already scattered on the forest floor. How strange, I thought, to have the biological drive to fly all the way to Mexico only to die within days of arrival.

  “In February, we saw evidence at El Rosario that monarchs caught in the open or on the ground at the end of the day had probably frozen to death. Cold mornings limited the ability of monarchs to fly to sources of water, and water became increasingly difficult to find as the winter progressed. At El Rosario, the lack of water contributed to an unusual redistribution of the monarchs late in the winter. In late February and March, a large portion of the colony moved downhill to a source of moisture and trees on the property of Angangueo, the adjacent ejido.… This appears to be the first time in memory that the colony resettled on the Angangueo side.

  “The condition of the monarchs at the end of winter probably determines their ability to remigrate in the spring. Was this a more stressful winter than normal? We don’t know.

  “Unlike the spring of 1997, there have been no reports of large numbers of spring monarchs on the move.… What does this mean? Are we in for a normal year, a good year, or a bad year? At this point, we don’t know.”

  OBSERVATION DOES NOT always yield a bad guy, even if the narrative demands it. No one knew if drought had caused the butterflies to move downhill. No one knew why they appeared to be in bad shape, or why the fall migration, considered to be the “best” in twenty years, had not led to overwhelming numbers in the preserves. No one knew what had happened to all those butterflies.

  Chapter 6

  TORPID, that’s the way a monarch in winter is often described, and there were times, sitting by the wood stove in my house in the mountains that January, watching the snow fall and the birds peck at the feeder, when I felt like that myself, as if a full day’s work would be to stay warm and dry. The snow would come, and then it would disappear, beaten back by an icy rain that kept tugging on the power lines, often taking them down. My family left for a while, and I was on my own, being careful always to have wood in the woodbox and candles and matches and jugs of water ready for the inevitable hours when the lights would flicker and there would be darkness and chill and a quiet that would amplify the dog’s breathing till it sounded like the saw of an ocean tide. There was a game my daughter and her schoolmates played called Predator and Prey, where the prey was a migrating monarch trying to avoid the long reach of its many predators. It was important, then, to “think like a monarch” in order to survive, and sometimes, stoking the fire and reading by flashlight on the couch at dusk, I would find myself thinking like I thought a monarch might “think,” thinking the most elemental thoughts about water and heat, nothing more.

  I called Lincoln Brower to get an update on the situation in Mexico, and he mentioned that there had been death threats made against Homero Aridjis, who now had three bodyguards and was thinking of leaving Mexico for a while. I took out a quarto of Homero’s poems and read them one evening in the uneven glow of the fire. “I have no fear of death I have died many times already,” began a poem called “Fray Gaspar De Caravajal Remembers the Amazon.” “Day after day like all men I have sailed toward nowhere in search of El Dorado but like them all I have found only / the extreme glare of extreme passion.”

  In those quiet, unmolested hours, I was wondering about passion, too—about why it arose and why it went away, and how it was that a small insect, for instance, was able to give people their voice. Was lepidoptery a way of cleaving to the authenticity of childhood, to a world undistracted by pretensions, the way certain passions of the flesh were not so much about loving someone else as about finding and expressing one’s true and essential self? “Passion extinguishes the logic in chronologic,” I wrote in my notebook on
January 12, a day when rain fell unseasonably and there was thunder and lightning and a wicked yellow sky. What I meant was that passion kept one fully in the present, so that time became a series of mutually exclusive “nows.” Passion obviated history.

  But what about migration? Nothing demands such complete attention to the present moment as survival, which, after all, is what the concerted movement from one geographic area to another is about. Yet success—getting there—rests on instinct, the repository of history. In the Old Testament God tells Moses to lead the Hebrew people out of Egypt and take them to Canaan, the land of milk and honey. It was the first recorded migration, that forty-year trip to bountiful, and as with the monarch migration, none who started the journey completed it. So how had they known where to go? Had they used a sun compass, relied on topographical cues, followed the stars? Had they been lured by the poles? The Bible says, but not exactly. Through Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Joshua, as the Hebrew people move across the desert, they are led and dragged and prompted by the hand of God.

  The enigmatic, improbable, long-distance, multigenerational movement of monarch butterflies has some resonance here. Since it makes so little sense that bugs, living serial lives, could find Canaan each year, and since science has not yet offered a sufficient explanation for how that happens, why not call it numinous and leave it at that? It wouldn’t be wrong—surely it wouldn’t be wrong—but the fact is, it would be small. It would fail to account for intention, if there is any, and for genetic memory, if that is there, and for the force as fundamental as blood or sex. The wind comes up, the rain comes down, the clouds cover the radial light. The asters have withered, the goldenrod, too, but the monarch, moving south-southwest, twenty-five, forty, eighty-nine miles a day, sure in its mission to survive and reproduce, adjusts. Adaptation, the engine of evolution, is always on full throttle. The constant, variable, unseen, unpredictable accommodations made by a migrating monarch to get to where it needs to go, and its ability to make them, are as essential to its evolutionary design as the shape of its wings or its unpalatability to most birds.