Four Wings and a Prayer Read online

  “Fifteen pesos per donkey,” they said. Two dollars.

  Chapter 4

  IT WAS DRY UP on Cerro Altamirano, but it was dry in Contepec, too—so much so that the authorities declared a water emergency. Showers were forbidden. Flushing the toilet was not looked upon kindly. There were times of the day when tap water was not available at all. There were fires—small ones, but even so, their smoke signaled what lay ahead if the drought did not end. The forests at the edge of town had become tinder, and everyone feared they would ignite. The overwintering sites were at risk, like everything else, but the drought could not be blamed on illegal logging practices there, or on the presidential decree, or on the butterflies themselves. This was an endemic problem, a national problem, having to do with changes to the land, and with population growth, and with the vagaries of weather. So even as the land parched at ten thousand feet and the water-shed diminished, Lincoln Brower’s hypothesis, that the butterflies were leaving the overwintering colonies early because they lacked water, remained unprovable.

  This was of no consolation to Homero Aridjis, who rode back to town brooding. And neither was this: the absence of monarch butterflies at one of their traditional wintering grounds was not meaningful. No one could say that the butterflies weren’t somewhere else on Cerro Altamirano; they often changed locales from year to year. Llano de la Mula might not be the St. Tropez, the Aspen, of 1997. And no one could say that monarchs were on the mountain at all. Some years particular overwintering grounds were just not used, and this might be one of those years. But this, too, was of no consolation to Aridjis, who knew that the forests of his boyhood were changing, had changed.

  ELSEWHERE THERE WERE reports of heavy concentrations of monarch butterflies, of air viscous with Danaus plexippus, places where you could not breathe with your mouth open. Sierra Chincua, near Angangueo, was one of these.

  “How many?” I asked Bill Calvert, who brought me there after the conference in Morelia. We were standing on a rock outcrop watching butterflies stream past like spawning salmon. To me their numbers were incalculable, like snow-flakes in a blizzard.

  Calvert didn’t hesitate. “Fifteen million,” he said.

  This was our last day together. Bill had dragged his groaning, bucking truck up the steep and rutted jeep trail and stashed it in the woods. We didn’t have the necessary permits to be anything more than tourists, but out came the scale and the ruler and the logbook anyway. The butterflies were here, and Bill Calvert was eager to know how they had fared after thousands of miles of wind and predators and rain and pesticides and spotty food supplies.

  Calvert knew this place. He had spent the better part of fourteen winters camped in these woods, often living by himself in a tent, carrying out his field studies. No one had spent more time here, and even as he walked us farther off the trail, I knew he knew exactly where we were, as if the dense underbrush were macadam marked clearly with a street sign. We turned left, then right, then went straight, losing vertical feet. We were going someplace, though it all looked alike. There were monarchs overhead, clinging to the oyamel trees, and monarchs on the ground, dead. Then the trees gave way to sky and we were standing on bare rock and the sky was a river of orange and black and it was fine that we could not open our mouths because there was nothing, really, to say. After a while we moved off the rock and back through the woods to a clearing and set up shop. Bill snagged about fifty butterflies; I found a clean piece of paper and made a matrix for recording the information. We got back to work, only vaguely conscious of the foot traffic nearby. Sierra Chincua had only recently been opened to the public and was popular with American visitors. We had seen an Audubon tour group earlier in the day.

  I looked up. A woman with a pair of Leica binoculars was standing over us, watching intently as Bill Calvert stuffed a butterfly into a glassine envelope the size of a book of stamps, to be weighed and released.

  “Aren’t you hurting them?” she asked indignantly.

  I was about to explain that the envelope protected the insects from themselves, keeping them from flapping wildly and using up precious energy supplies or damaging their wings, but Calvert beat me to it.

  “No,” he said. That was all. He looked up and smiled. I knew that sly turn of mouth. Something was up. “Isn’t that a black-backed oriole?” he asked idly.

  “Where?” the woman asked anxiously, looking up.

  “Over there.” Bill pointed. The woman put her binoculars to her eyes and walked off, calling to her friends. As soon as she was gone, we picked ourselves up and moved farther into the understory.

  “You try catching this time,” Bill said, handing me the net. This was like sending in a rookie pitcher at the end of a 12–0 game. There were so many monarchs fanning the air that some couldn’t help but fly right into the net. I took a single swipe and landed three hundred butterflies. I got the win!

  “You know we could be arrested for this,” Bill Calvert would say now and then as we worked. This was not worry talking, it was gleefulness—two sigmas above normal for a seventeen-year-old in gleefulness.

  THE MONARCHS LOOKED GOOD. Only a few were tattered or bird-bitten, only a few were thin. Most were bright orange, with full bellies and minimal wear and tear to their wings. They had flown thousands of miles, but there was no way to tell that from looking at them. They had come through just fine.

  Although we didn’t say so, we were also looking for tags—tiny dots of paper the size of the circle spit out from a hole punch. They would be stuck to the underside of the hind wing. The tags had a sequence of letters and numbers on them—QS498 or NG304—and some other information as well. The tags asked people who found the butterflies, or sighted them, to report their findings to Monarch Watch, at the University of Kansas, which had been tracking the monarch butterfly migration since 1992 and posting the data on the Internet. We looked, but our looking was reflexive. Of the hundred thousand butterflies that were tagged that year, fewer than two hundred were ever found, and only forty-six of them in Mexico. We were in the midst of fifteen million butterflies. We knew the odds and looked anyway. I had tagged twenty monarch butterflies myself, months before in northern New York, and it was these that I was looking for. I had looked in Austin, and in Ciudad Maíz, and in Tula. I had looked in Morelia and in Jamauve. I would look till I left Mexico.

  THE BEST TIME to tag a butterfly is in the morning. The air is cool then, and the sun is just rising, and the butterfly, too cold to sustain flight, is nearly paralyzed. Pick it off a tree limb or off a flower and it will seem docile, nearly tame. (It will also seem stuck there: its feet have a natural Velcro on them; it sounds like tearing when you pick it up, but it’s not tearing.) You can hold the monarch in your hand, stick it to your sweater. It will not go anywhere. You can collect a bunch this way.

  You will need a set of tags, a piece of paper, and a pencil. The pencil does double duty. Use it first to note the time of day, the date, your name, the place where you are, the number on the tag, the sex of the butterfly. (Males have small but prominent black dots on their hind wings—pheromone sacs—and females do not.) Think of the wing as a piece of stained glass, with the black lines as the leading. The distal cell is the largest pane, and the tag will fit neatly within its boundaries. Peel the tag off its backing and stick it there. (Don’t worry if some of the monarch’s orange scales come off; it will still be able to fly.) Use the pencil to reinforce the adhesive, rubbing the tag with the eraser end. Make sure it is secure. Put the monarch back on your sweater or on a nearby bush. Repeat the procedure with another butterfly. Watch as the sun rises and warms them up. Watch as they take to the air and disappear, carrying your efforts, and your best wishes, and any dream you’ve ever had of winning the lottery or the trifecta or the Publishers’ Clearinghouse sweepstakes skyward with them.

  THE MONARCH I WAS really hoping to find had left my yard on the twenty-sixth of August. My daughter had found it near the end of July feeding on the milkweed near the basketball hoop, ha
ving deduced it was there from a pile of caterpillar scat and then carefully turning over leaf after leaf until she located it three plants over. She was thrilled. It was as if her intelligence alone had put it there: she thought it should be there, and there it was! To the extent that there was ownership, this caterpillar was hers. It was only about a week old when we brought it to the back porch, put it in the cage we had made from a cardboard box and an old screen, and named it Junior to distinguish it from some of the others there—Biggie, Itsy, and Bitsy among them.

  I told myself I was doing this for my daughter’s sake, so she could witness the metamorphosis from caterpillar to butterfly. I could describe it to her, or show her pictures or even a video, but none was in real time. Each condensed the experience to the point where amazing and remarkable and awesome were the only words that seemed appropriate. And while it was all of those things, they all missed the nuanced, constant, incremental, and very-rarely-awesome-in-its-particulars way that that remarkable and amazing transformation was occurring. In any case, it was only partly true that it was for my daughter’s sake. I wanted to see it. Metamorphosis, like resurrection, is a powerful symbol. But what was happening in the cardboard box was not symbolic at all. It was nature investing symbolism with its power.

  “RAISING” MONARCHS, as many schoolchildren know, is a blessedly simple task. Supply the caterpillars with fresh milkweed and water daily and watch them grow. In three weeks an individual monarch caterpillar will increase its weight three thousand times and outgrow its skin over and over again, molting five times. When it unzips its striped cuticle for the fifth time, though, it does not acquire a new skin. Instead it seems to turn inside out altogether, and when it is done there is a pale-green chrysalis studded with five gold dots, and no sign at all of the caterpillar that was there.

  On the porch we were seeing this with Junior. On August 6 she crawled to the top of the cardboard box, secreted a gluey white liquid, and anchored herself to it. The glue was liquid silk, spun and deposited by Junior’s spinnerets. When it was made, she backed up to it and grabbed on with her anal claspers till she was securely fastened. Then she hung there like a health nut in inversion boots, her body forming a perfect J. This step was critical. A few weeks before, Biggie had fallen to the bottom of the box after his chrysalis was made. When he emerged, full-grown, his wing was crumpled and he was unable to fly. He was the monarch that was eaten by mice in our kitchen.

  That night, the night of the chrysalis, my daughter told me a story at bedtime. “This will be a little scary and a little sad,” she warned me. “Once there was a little girl who woke up with spots all over her. That’s the scary part. Soon she made a J and then died. That’s the sad part. But she didn’t really die because when she came out of her chrysalis she was a beautiful butterfly.”

  THAT “DIED BUT didn’t really die” part was as good a description as any of what was happening inside the acorn-shaped shell that Junior had made. She had gone into it a caterpillar and she would, if all went well, emerge as something completely different—a butterfly. In between she was neither, her larval self having dissolved into a viscous genetic stew that would reconstitute itself into the constituent parts of a butterfly.

  After my daughter fell asleep, I opened a book called The World of the Monarch Butterfly and copied this into my notebook:

  “The change of form and function affects every part of the insect’s being, from its senses to the way it moves and feeds. Buds of tissue in the thorax grow and develop into wings. The larva’s leaf-nibbling jaws dissolve and new adult mouth parts grow, later fitting together to make a hollow tube through which the adult butterfly will draw nectar. The long intestine shrinks to match the new diet, and sex organs appear for the first time. Long, delicate antennae develop on the insect’s head, and the twelve simple eyes of the caterpillar are replaced by the two huge compound eyes of the adult. All these changes are finely coordinated, so none comes too soon or too late.”

  INSIDE HER GREEN ENVELOPE, this was happening to Junior. I didn’t know this for sure, of course, since the chrysalis was opaque, but this was what was supposed to be happening, having happened countless times before. The accountability of nature offers its own path to knowledge. I might never have seen a monarch butterfly emerge from a chrysalis, but I could assume it would. It was knowledge that I could count on, that we all do count on—the background knowledge (the sun will rise, the tides will ebb, the trees will bud) that lets us live our lives so exclusively in the foreground.

  On August 25 I had the first direct evidence that the metamorphosis not only was occurring but was almost complete: Junior’s chrysalis was no longer green, it was black. Then I shined a light on it and saw that it wasn’t black at all, it was transparent. The black I was seeing was part of a wing. I could see it, too.

  Junior was reborn at 8:23 A.M. Her wings were stubby, condensed, and her abdomen was enormous. She looked like a mutant. A pair of long, articulated legs that ended in pincers grasped her recently vacated apartment. Then her abdomen started to heave, pumping fluid through her veins. Her wings opened to full size like a pocket umbrella whose button had been pushed.

  I brought the box outside and let it sit in the sun. Junior clung to her chrysalis and swayed in the breeze like a piece of clothing on the line. Her proboscis yoyoed in and out. At 9:25, an hour into her new life, Junior spread her wings for the first time. They were a deep, almost red, orange. And it really was a new life, at least as against how I had imagined her living it (heading south, wintering in Mexico, mating, heading north, laying eggs, dying), for when her wings were fully expanded, I saw that she was not a she at all. Junior was a male.

  Two hours later, when his wings were fully hardened, I gave him his tag and held him up to the sun. I said a short prayer that was really just a wish and waited for him to take off. It’s so easy to impute emotions to wild creatures, and even easier to have personal feelings for them. It was more than twenty-four hundred miles from my yard to the Neovolcanics, and I really wanted Junior to make it. He pumped his wings a few times and peered over the edge of my palm like a diver contemplating the deep end of the pool. Then, without warning, he took off. His wings flapped confidently and he moved like a finch, undulating through the air. What was I to him? I wondered. Probably a tree, I thought, as he circled around me three times before landing in the grass near the pond, then high-jumping to a low branch of a white pine. There he sat for what seemed to me, who was just sitting, too, to be a long time. I went inside. Fifteen minutes later he was out of sight. Gone.

  So it was Junior I was looking for when I scanned a roost with my binoculars. Junior I was hoping to find every time I pulled a monarch from Bill Calvert’s net and measured its wingspan. Junior I knew I had absolutely no chance of finding, yet continued to look for, which was, when I thought about it, the acknowledgment of, the recognition of, belief, which is its own kind of story.

  “MONARCHS ARE really spiritual for some people,” the Canadian monarch enthusiast Don Davis said to me one day. “I had one lady tell me she kept a dead monarch in her refrigerator because it was some sort of religious symbol.” Don was the sort of fellow to whom people told things like that. And chances were, once they had, he would let everyone else know by posting it on D-Plex—short for Danaus plexippus—the ongoing Internet conversation about monarchs run by Monarch Watch. Information came in and information went out, and when it did, Don Davis was usually involved in the transaction somehow. Academic papers, popular articles, videos, meetings, companies’ using monarch butterflies in their advertising—he kept everyone abreast of all of these. Writers called him to check facts, film crews relied on him to guide them, teachers sought him out to give lectures, newspaper reporters wrote annual features about his butterfly work, calling him Mr. Monarch. His “Odds and Ends from Don Davis” was a regular feature of the D-Plex list, a random assortment of monarch comings and goings, like the social column of a local newspaper. And that was in addition to his other messa
ges, which sometimes numbered four in a single day. He was the scribe, the keeper of the history, the librarian of the monarch community.

  Of course he was retired—how else could he devote so much time to this? A retired, white-haired, Canadian gentleman: that was how I pictured him, though all I knew for sure was that he was from Toronto. The mind plays interesting tricks, sorting the evidence and fitting it into a template. People are usually more idiosyncratic than we imagine. The retired, white-haired, elderly gentleman I had come to know over the Internet did not exist. When I finally met him, on a summer’s day in Toronto, I saw that Don Davis was a small, bespectacled man in his late forties who wore his unfashionably stiff blue jeans unfashionably rolled at the bottom. For twenty-five years he had been a counselor at a Toronto home for abused and troubled children, where he sometimes spent the night. He was unmarried. He was devoted to his Children’s Aid work; the monarchs were just a sideline. Still, when asked to describe who he was, he did not hesitate. “I’m an amateur field naturalist,” he said.

  Among people who tagged monarch butterflies, though, Don Davis was more than that: he was a celebrity. No one had had more tags recovered in Mexico, eighteen so far. No single person had tagged as many butterflies as Don Davis, either, an estimated twenty thousand since 1985. But as great as that number was, it was nothing, really, compared to the number of monarchs migrating over all those years—something like three billion.

  So Don Davis, an unassuming man, was embarrassed that luck had been confused with accomplishment. “Back in 1985 I thought it would be really neat to tag a butterfly in Ontario and have it picked up in Mexico. So I did some tagging and the next year I had one picked up there,” he said. That was all. He wanted it to happen, and it happened. It was a fluke that year, a fluke the year after that when two more of his tags were found, and a fluke every other time. Yet it kept happening.