Four Wings and a Prayer Page 12

  OK, he wasn’t just doing what everyone else was doing, but he was doing a lot of it. He had two toll-free numbers on which people could call in to report sightings of the tags he’d printed up. He had been down to Mexico a few times, and back and forth across the country, and once to Australia. He was genuinely interested in monarch butterflies, interested in what could only be called a scientific way. But he was not really interested in doing science. He refused to write up his findings; he had turned down a serious offer by Professor Adrian Wenner to coauthor a paper on California monarchs. He was not interested in “peer review,” even though he kept on putting out his ideas on D-Plex and watching the scientists knock him about. None of it—not Lincoln Brower’s hectoring, not Chip Taylor’s patient efforts at damage control each time Cherubini posted a message that contained controversial or erroneous information, not Sonia Altizer’s refutations or Bob Pyle’s passionate pleas—threw him off course. In the drama to which they were all, even Cherubini himself, contributors, Cherubini wanted desperately, earnestly, to play the bad guy. It was the one role in which he could distinguish himself.

  “You know what I think? I think maybe they’re scared to death about what I’ll find out when I do these transfers. I think that maybe they’re scared I’ll show that California monarchs can get to El Rosario.” Cherubini laughed and looked gleeful.

  “Actually,” he said, lowering his voice, “I already did that. A butterfly that I tagged in California and [that] was shipped to Montana was found in Mexico in 1992. An eleven-year-old girl found it. And no one called to tell me. Whoever controls the logbook didn’t bother to let me know. I was wondering if the California monarchs would go to Mexico or fly back to California. They all went to Mexico. After that I found out that if you’re close to the Continental Divide they can go either way.

  “Nobody knows that Montana monarch came from California. I didn’t tell anyone except my close friends. If people knew, they’d say, ‘He’s done it again. He’s threatened the migration,’ “ Paul Cherubini said, not unhappily.

  STILL, NOT ALL genetic mutation was “bad”—or, for that matter, “good.” More often than not the natural world remains outside the realm of moral values; questions of good and bad do not come into play. Even so, human behaviors have an inadvertent tendency to spill, like oil pumped with the bilge, beyond our own species. Of the thirteen kinds of butterflies found throughout the Hawaiian Islands, for instance, only two are native. The rest are immigrants whose ancestors arrived on hay bales and host plants imported by people. No one knows precisely how the monarch, one of these, got to the islands, or when, but by the mid–nineteenth century it was resident and common. Even more mysterious was the appearance of a rare genetic variant, a white monarch butterfly, at around the same time. Not an albino—that would be all white—but a monarch with its black markings intact and white where there should have been orange.

  “The orange pigment is the end product of some metabolic pathway,” Dale Clayton, a biologist at Southwestern Adventist University in Keene, Texas, told me, trying to explain how a monarch could become white—or at least not become orange. Clayton and his colleague Dan Petr, another Southwestern Adventist biologist, were the authors of the only field guide to Hawaiian butterflies and had probably seen more whites in the wild than anyone—and even that wasn’t many.

  “I once chased a white monarch down the street in Honolulu. People must have thought I was crazy, running in and out of traffic,” Dan mentioned when we talked by phone, and the image of him dodging cars and trucks to get a glimpse of this exceptional creature made me want to see it, too. “If you can be at the road to South Point on the Big Island on January thirtieth early in the morning,” Petr offered, “we’ll try to find some whites.”

  “METABOLIC PATHWAYS MAY have three or four or seven or ten or some number of intermediaries, and it takes specific enzymes to convert to the next intermediary,” Dale was saying. It was eight-fifteen in the morning on the penultimate day of January and we were sitting in the pair’s rental car, driving the South Point road at something under fifteen miles an hour. “If you have a genetic mutation, then that pathway doesn’t go to orange.” Dale did some calculations on a piece of paper and handed it over the front seat. I looked at the inscrutable symbols he had written down. It was the recipe for white monarch.

  Dale also passed the road atlas. “This is where we are and this is where we are going,” he said, drawing his finger along the road to South Point. The two places were essentially the same. “The road is twelve miles long,” Dan explained. “If we take it slow we’ll have a pretty good chance of finding a white monarch.” By then we had started to cruise the shoulder and I was finding it difficult to listen and look at the same time. Suddenly, without warning, Dan hit the brakes and we stopped short and Dale bailed out of the car, catapulted over a barbed-wire fence, and loped across an uncultivated, weedy field. All this happened without their exchanging more than three words: “Balloon plant,” Dan said. “Right,” Dale said, already pushing past the car door.

  Balloon plant was a kind of milkweed common to Hawaii, and as Dale waded through it, a handful of monarchs rose up like dust underfoot. No whites, though. “This is like the fishing business,” Dan said to me as we watched Dale swipe his net a few times, then turn and trot back to the car. “Sometimes you catch ’em and sometimes you don’t.” This was one of those “don’t” times.

  In another way, it was not slim pickings at all. As we moved slowly toward South Point, the southernmost tip of the United States, the biologists pointed out a gulf fritillary feeding on a passion vine, dozens of tiny bean butterflies, and the occasional banana skipper. Left and right, all along the road, there were doves and skylarks and grazing cows that spread across the scrubby, tree-bent pastureland as if this were the heartland, not the tropics. It was impossible not to sense the ocean, though, and to expect it, and there it was, finally, at the end of a rutted dirt track, the whole wide expanse of it. We stood there straining our eyes—not at the fishermen casting for pompano, but at the horizon and its promise, seventy-five hundred miles hence, of the next continental landfall: Antarctica.

  Back in the car Dan vowed to drive even more slowly and to get out and walk more, for he and Dale were convinced that if we were going to see a white monarch, it was going to be here, on this road. It took us nearly an hour to travel eight miles, and during that time, Dale resumed his genetics lesson and Dan offered an abbreviated history of Hawaiian flora and fauna, which began with the arrival, two thousand years ago, of the Polynesians, bearing twenty-three kinds of plants; touched on the fact that of the forty-five thousand species of mammals in the world, only one, a bat, was native to Hawaii; and ended with the observation that there was little to be found in these islands that was indigenous, an observation that held true for the islands’ human populations as well. Although we were progressing, it felt as if we were going nowhere, and then, a little desperately, one of us suggested that we stop back at the field with the balloon plant and make a more thorough inventory. Our last chance. But before we could get there, Dan stopped the car short again and pointed to a different place, a hilly field that was home to a herd of cattle. “See the balloon plant?” he said, and this time we all spilled out of the car, nets drawn, like cops on the heels of a wily suspect.

  “There!” Dale called. “There!” I saw a cloud of orange monarchs thirty feet away. Dale moved closer, walking on his toes. And then I saw it, too, a single white monarch needling in among and around the others. It was gorgeous, the way it pulled in the sunlight and sent it out again like a high beam. I followed it with my eyes and got dizzy. Dale, meanwhile, was moving with quiet dispatch through the knee-high grass. “Come out, come out, baby,” he called, and the white monarch heard and buzzed his head. Dale parried his net like a lacrosse stick—once, twice, three times. “Got it!” he cried as Dan and I rushed up, congratulating him the whole way, and he pulled it out so we could admire it, which we did, again and agai
n.

  ONCE I HAD SEEN a white monarch aloft against the blue sky, I let the Hawaiian waters draw me in, sailing in a fifty-foot catamaran up the Kona coast toward Puako. The rugged beach there is often home to the Hawaiian green turtle, which feeds on algae growing in its shallow pools. It is not unusual to find the turtles asleep on the lava outcrop-pings or dug into the sand, and to mistake their profile for landscape. It was not possible, however, to mistake the gray whales off our starboard for anything. Migrants, they had come from Arctic waters to breed. “The juveniles gain about three thousand pounds in the three months they’re here,” said the boat’s captain. “The babies are said to grow by something like seven pounds an hour.”

  Back on shore I went up to Puako to get a bearing on where I’d been. It was a lazy expedition, no agenda, and so I sat on the veranda of the Puako General Store eating lunch, aimlessly regarding a pair of cardinals and the occasional cabbage white butterfly—both North American imports, like me. Although I should have been trained by then, it took a while for my eyes to see that there was a hedge of crown flower milkweed not twenty feet in front of me, and monarchs nectaring on its blossoms. Entranced, I moved off the porch to get a better look. The trees were alive with butterflies. Continuing down the road, I spied more monarchs, and more crown flowers, and more monarchs. It occurred to me that by now I must have seen thousands of monarch butterflies, and still they pulled me down the street as if they had my hand firmly in the grip of theirs. I stopped in front of a small gray house whose entire front lawn had been given over to a flower garden. The garden was teeming with monarchs, and one of them, I noticed, was white. I followed it around to the backyard, where I met the woman of the house, an eighty-seven-year-old native Hawaiian whose face and hands were as topographical as the carefully placed coral that studded her horseshoe beachfront. She was neither startled by my sudden appearance there nor unwelcoming. She pointed to the metal chair beside her on the veranda.

  “Don’t you have these at home?” she asked as I took a seat beside her and we watched the white monarch chase an orange out to sea, and seemed pleased for herself and sorry for me when I told her we did not. A gust of wind came off the ocean, lobbing the white monarch shoreward, and it lay for a long time in the grass.

  The woman told me bits of her story—worked at the flower shop at the Mauna Kea Beach Hotel, used to live up in Volcanoes, raised potatoes, was a retired lei maker. She wanted to feed me, to give me things, to show me pictures, to explain things about natural history. “The monarchs like crown flower because it is syrupy,” she said. “Doesn’t matter if caterpillars eat my plants. They need food, too.” She wanted to know about me, too, who just wandered into her yard the way a butterfly might, blown in with the wind.

  And then there was nothing to say, so we sat there watching the white monarch going nowhere and the ocean chasing some surfers back to the beach. What is passion? I asked myself again. It is the collapse of space between two or more bodies, I decided as the woman’s face drew close to my own. It is strangers meeting in trust because, though their physical histories are unknown to each other, they are connected by what moves them. It is a cliché to talk about love that binds, but love does bind, and that is why passion, especially passion for a thing, is a way of knowing that comes before epistemology.

  “My nephew will continue to feed the insects when I am gone,” the woman said at last, answering a question that had not been uttered. No; answering a question that had not been uttered out loud.

  Chapter 7

  FEBRUARY CAME, and March, and instead of slinking away, winter socked into the mountains like a thick fog. It snowed on March 14, a heavy, wet snow that clotted the roads, making them impassable. When the sun came out we put on skis greased with blue wax and flew through the woods as if those skis were wings. Up one hill, down another, stomach to follow, while the chickadees and goldfinches, their feathers mottled as if, having dressed for one season, they were now deciding better of it, moved overhead, no more graceful than we were.

  The air was still frigid, topping off at freezing most days, and thoughts of the tropics and of tropical butterflies were overwhelmed by the drifts of snow hugging the kitchen windows and the prowl of sanding trucks moving slowly across the frozen pavement. Ice still lay across our pond, a big, un-breachable pane of it, and on sunny days it was possible to look through it like glass and see last summer’s weeds and misthrown tennis balls and other lost treasures.

  It was disconcerting to tune in to Monarch Watch and hear Chip Taylor exclaim about spring and the impending breakup of the Mexican colonies. From where I sat, it was neither warm enough nor green enough to imagine butterflies’ being able to head north. If there was a human equivalent of the switch that turned off diapause, enabling one’s imagination to range beyond the present, mine was disengaged.

  Throughout the winter, as the butterflies huddled under the canopy of oyamel trees and the traffic on D-Plex slowed, I kept track of another migrant crisscrossing the Mexican border with the regularity of a commuter. By my count, Bill Calvert had been back to Mexico four times since I said good-bye to him in Contepec the previous November. Now here he was again, as the snow was flying in the Adirondacks, writing from Mexico that the spring exodus from El Rosario had begun.

  “The monarchs again put on a sterling performance last week!” he reported on March 16. “During our last day in the area, we witnessed a massive flow of tens of thousands of butterflies flying out of the colony down across a pasture. All of the butterflies within three meters of the ground were flying in the same direction, giving the impression of a massive sheet of orange-and-black-colored creatures streaming slowly downward. At the middle of the pasture there was a seep of water. Thousands of monarchs were at the seep drinking water from the water-soaked mud and from open pools, but the majority were flying on past the seep. Above three meters fewer butterflies were flying in the opposite direction back toward the colony.

  “This colony was the Rosario ‘bud colony.’ It was the lower part of the Rosario colony that had budded off from the main colony, which occupied a site in the same drainage, but at a higher elevation. Each day more butterflies left the upper (original) colony and joined the bud colony. At this point in time (March 11), it was hard to tell whether the bud colony or the main colony had more butterflies. The bud colony was stopped from descending to even lower elevations by fields and pastures that came all the way up to three thousand meters’ elevation. Monarch colonies always descend the mountain during the course of the [winter], accelerating during late February and March when the combination of intense sunshine and lack of clouds and moisture in the air warms up the ambient considerably. The descent is almost always associated with a particular arroyo or drainage.

  “At Rosario they usually follow the drainage called Arroyo Los Conejos. However, this year they used another drainage about 1.5 kilometers to the northwest of Los Conejos, called the Rio Grande by the locals. When we were there (well into the dry season), there was only a little water flowing in it.

  “The lack of forest at the field edge did not stop them entirely, however. During the day butterflies poured out of the bud colony and over the ridge at the little community, La Salud, toward Angangueo. These butterflies are undoubtedly part of the return migration to the United States and Canada. Each day tens of thousands pass through the town of Angangueo. They are all going in the same direction—northward. Back toward Rosario, many thousands are taking nectar from flowering plants, especially eupatorium and senecio along the road to Angangueo. Many of these do not return to the bud colony mentioned above. Instead they bud again, forming smaller aggregations in remnant pieces of woods along the Angangueo-Rosario road. These small remnants of woodland may be very important to them in offering nighttime shelter from cold and predators.”

  CALVERT’S MESSAGE APPEARED not on D-Plex but on Journey North, an educational Internet site dedicated to tracking the northward progress of a number of spring migrants, monarch butterf
lies included. Every week from the end of winter to the beginning of summer, migration updates were posted and maps drawn. Texas, Louisiana, Missouri, Kansas, Illinois, Ohio: it was like a national wave cheer as the monarchs swept through.

  The butterflies were dispersing across a wide swath of the country. This was one of the main characteristics of the spring migration. Having come from that wide swath and then funneled into Mexico in the fall, the butterflies simply went out of it in reverse, leaving together through the narrow channel of the funnel, then scattering into the big wide world. We tend to think of a migration as a movement from one place to another—from Ontario, say, to Michoacán. The spring migration, from a few very concentrated places in the south to the entire eastern segment of the United States and parts of Canada, seemed less that than a random dispersal. Still, the monarchs were shifting habitats to take advantage of abundant food and places to lay eggs as spring and summer moved north through the flora—the very definition of migration. Meanwhile, milkweed, though not migratory, was doing a wave cheer of its own, reborn at higher and higher latitudes as the soil heated up, and the air warmed, and daylight limbered, stretching, stretching, and stretching some more.

  JUST AS THE fall migration had captured the imagination of scientists and citizens for the better part of a century, maybe more, the spring movement of monarch butterflies had also piqued their curiosity. Once the Urquharts found the Mexican overwintering grounds, they began tagging butterflies there, hoping to recapture them once the colonies had broken up. The assumption was that the butterflies went north; a recaptured monarch would be good evidence to support that hypothesis. But it was one thing to demonstrate that monarchs from the United States and Canada spent the cold months in the Mexican mountains, and quite another to say that the monarch butterflies that had wintered in Mexico spent the spring and summer in North America. It was a third thing altogether to say—to demonstrate—that the butterflies that made the trip south in October were the very same ones that flew north in March. That would mean that those butterflies were living for six and seven months or more. It would mean either that they were recolonizing the entire northern range, moving up the latitudes like a ladder, breeding and laying eggs as they went, or that they were going part of the way, breeding, and then dying. In that case no individual monarch would make the entire round trip. In that case forget bird migration—the comparison would no longer be apt.