Four Wings and a Prayer Read online

  Don Davis held other monarch records as well: the greatest number of monarchs recovered in Mexico in one year (ten in 1991); the monarch that flew the longest distance (2,880 miles from Brighton, Ontario, to Mexico to Austin, Texas, where it was recovered on April 8, 1998, seven months after being tagged); the earliest tagging date for a monarch recovered in Mexico (August 14); and the most monarchs tagged by a single individual in a single year (seven thousand). He was the only monarch tagger to have been included in the Guinness Book of World Records (for tagging the monarch that flew the longest distance). Don Davis: the Carl Lewis, the Wilma Rudolph, the Mark Spitz of the monarch world.

  Although he didn’t hold the record, Don Davis had been tagging monarchs longer than almost everyone else, too—over thirty years. “In 1967 I heard about a fellow named Urquhart who was tagging butterflies,” he recalled. “Bird banding takes more skill, but anyone can tag a butterfly. So I wrote to him and asked if I could volunteer. I was seventeen years old.” This was before the Mexican sites had been found and before much at all was known about monarchs’ winter behavior. There were theories, though—that they hibernated, that they went to the southern United States, that they went to Central America, that they went every which way and mostly died off. Fred Urquhart, a professor of zoology at the University of Toronto and curator of insects at the Royal Ontario Museum, wanted to know the answer. In 1938 he started putting tags on monarchs, handwritten tabs of paper that he fastened with glue. They fell off the first time it rained. Urquhart spent years perfecting his tags, at last settling on an alar tag that required him to rub the scales off the front forewing and glue it there. Despite the lost scales and the size of the tag, it didn’t seem to affect the butterflies’ ability to fly. Meanwhile, his bosses at the Royal Museum thought he was a little daft.

  “Each year the director asked for a statement of what each member of the staff had been doing so that he could submit a report to the government,” Urquhart remembered. “One year I suggested that a statement be included concerning the results I had obtained in following the migration of the monarch butterfly, to which he responded in a rather disapproving tone: ‘What would the government think of a staff member’s spending his time placing pieces of paper on butterflies’ wings?’ But I continued to carry out my monarch butterfly hobby … and so the study continued on a rather small scale year after year.”

  Inspired by ornithologists, who had long relied on amateurs in their studies of bird migration, Urquhart and his wife, Norah, decided to try to enlist the support of large numbers of volunteers to tag and then track monarch butterflies. In 1952 Norah put out a call in the magazine Natural History. Within a few years there were some three thousand “research associates,” scattered across Canada and the United States, engaged in the Urquharts’ monarch project. Don Davis was one of these. “In terms of Fred’s project, you didn’t have to be a rocket scientist or a Ph.D. to make a contribution to a significant scientific project,” Davis observed. “People felt good about that.”

  It was brilliant public relations, too, to call the taggers research associates. It gave them an identity and status. They deputized themselves; credentials were unimportant. The scientific enterprise was democratized, or so it seemed. The Urquharts were still in charge—it was their research—but people felt good about helping them, about contributing to science. They knew, as did the Urquharts themselves, that the professor and his wife could not do this work alone if it was to yield meaningful results. “There is a limit to what one can accomplish in a project requiring the marking of migrant monarchs,” Fred Urquhart reminded his taggers in a retrospective message written fifty years after he began gluing strips of paper to monarch wings. Even if the work of the research associates was more enthusiastic than it was rigorous, it still pushed the rock of knowledge a little farther up the hill.

  Almost as soon as the help of nonscientists was enlisted, the data began to accumulate and take shape. In the first volume of their Newsletter to Research Associates, Insect Migration Studies (1964), the Urquharts reported that a monarch tagged in Grafton, Ontario, had been found in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Another, tagged at Niagara Falls, had been recovered in Muskogee, Oklahoma. The butterflies were moving south, for sure, perhaps along a variety of flyways. Subsequent years offered more information, which in turn raised more questions. Why did a butterfly released in Morgantown, West Virginia, fly to Laurel, Maryland, for instance? And how did a monarch tagged seventy miles east of Toronto on September 25, 1968, end up forty-nine days later in Havana, Cuba, a flight that would have put it over water for one hundred miles?

  Two years later the Urquharts had their first recaptures in Mexico, about forty miles northwest of Mexico City. “We have had very interesting letters from the captors in Mexico stating that these tagged butterflies were found among many thousands of monarchs roosting in the same area so that we now have proof that the migration occurs in large numbers in Central Mexico,” they told their associates in 1972. “Our task now is to trace the migration further south, possibly to Central America.” In fact, those roosts northwest of Mexico City were only a day or two away from the overwintering sites.

  “It has been, and continues to be, a most fascinating study,” the Urquharts continued. “When you pause to think about it, you realize that when we first started we were not certain that all monarchs migrated and that for those that appeared to do so we had no accurate data informing us of their final flight destination. We suspected that they flew from the northern United States and Canada to Florida and perhaps along the Gulf Coast, there to remain, returning the following spring. We now know that it is much more complex than that. We now know, from definitive data, that the population from the northeastern parts of the United States and Canada actually [flies] across the continent from northeast to southwest, finally arriving in southern Mexico and parts of Central America—a most remarkable flight for what seems to be so frail an insect.”

  In reality, there were no hard data about southern Mexico and Central America—this was just conjecture—but even so, the story was accumulating, like snow on the ground. Every year the Urquharts would send out their Insect Migration Studies and the mystery would unfold a little further. It was like the first draft of a novel doled out at the rate of one page a year. But it wasn’t just a solution to the mystery of where monarchs went in the winter that the Urquharts were after. It might have started that way, but over the years Urquhart and his wife had become missionaries, too—not so much on behalf of the butterflies, but for the scientific process itself.

  “Is it not most satisfying to be involved in the project that takes us out-of-doors; that frees our minds of the petty annoyances of life; that brings us so close to the marvelous workings of nature, and trying to answer the many little and big problems that nature presents to us?” they rhapsodized in 1970. “How much pleasure it is for our young people to be engrossed in a project such as this instead of the many other unfortunate pastimes that occupy so many of our young people today. Together we share our experiences; and together we tell others about our activities and publish the answers to many problems for our scientific colleagues.”

  But as time went on, the Urquharts became less generous with their information, not more. They grew proprietary, even paranoid, and when in 1975 an associate of theirs from Mexico City, an American textile engineer named Kenneth Brugger, made a fabulous discovery, they were remarkably unmoved. As Brugger told it, “I was returning late in the day from visiting my girlfriend and suddenly I [was] engulfed in a flock of butterflies thicker than I’d ever seen before. Millions. So many that they were falling and being knocked down to the blacktop and cars were slipping and sliding on them. I had to stop. I had a big Winnebago. No cars were moving because the road was so slippery with butterflies. I worked my way back to Mexico City and called Urquhart. He wasn’t too impressed with what [I’d seen].

  “A month or two later he wanted me to run his research in Mexico. He gave me a lot of fals
e information because he got it secondhand. Luckily, as a child my girlfriend had been in that part of Mexico where the butterflies were. She used to bring lunches to her grandfather in the mountains. She used to flop on the back of an old swayback mare and ride up to where he ate lunch.

  “We went through a lot of dangerous territory. People threatened to shoot us. They told us that Zapata had hidden some gold up there and they thought we were looking for that. We kept going up higher every day. I wasn’t looking in the air, I was looking on the ground. Monarch butterflies were dead on the ground. The higher we went, the more there were. And we got to a place where they were real thick on the ground, dead. Kept going and kept going and then we saw them—twenty-one trees loaded with monarch butterflies.

  “I called the professor and told him what we’d found. He didn’t know me that well so maybe he didn’t believe me—I don’t know. He didn’t come down till the next year.”

  Meanwhile, Ken Brugger continued his search, looking for other colonies. It didn’t take him long to find them: “I met a Mexican who said he used to go up in the mountains as a child and that the butterflies didn’t always go to the same place every year. He took me up. Between us we found four or five different colonies.

  “The butterflies would go up in November and do what I called overnighting. They would stay in one place overnight, then go up the mountain maybe a thousand feet or so. The next day we’d go to that tree and they’d be gone. We kept following dead butterflies on the ground and there they would be, a little higher. They would make about six or seven trips up there till they finally got to an area they could live with, that had the right kind of trees and the right altitude.”

  The Urquharts showed up the next year, in January 1976. Ken Brugger arranged for their accommodations and took them up the mountain. In their newsletter of that year they reported, “Last year we informed you of the fact that we had discovered the overwintering site of the monarch butterfly in Mexico. We also informed you that there would be an article published in the National Geographic magazine dealing with this discovery and how, after many years’ effort, we finally located it with your assistance.” Such is the fate of “research associates,” the sherpas of science. Few people remember that they led the way up the mountain, reaching the summit first. Credit for finding the overwintering sites went to Professor Urquhart and his wife, who hadn’t yet seen them.

  The National Geographic article, when it came out in 1976, caused quite a stir. A mystery had been solved, and the pictures were sensational. Lincoln Brower, who had been studying the migratory behavior of western monarchs, contacted the Urquharts to get directions to the Mexican colonies. The article had been purposely vague, ostensibly to keep the public away, but when Brower, who hoped to continue his own monarch research there, inquired, the Urquharts declined to share the exact location. They had gotten there first. It was theirs.

  Undeterred, Bill Calvert took the National Geographic and a map of Mexico and made a guess about where to go, got in his van, and started looking. Then came his discovery, and that New Year’s Day phone call to Brower, and Brower’s hasty trip to Mexico, and the unpleasant meeting in the forest when Lincoln Brower held out his hand to Fred Urquhart and the Canadian refused to take it. Brower and Calvert, Ken Brugger said, were the opposing faction. There would be no meeting of the minds. Not then, not ever.

  Once he got to the woods, Urquhart knew he was on to something big—bigger even than the discovery of the roosts themselves. “On the morning of January 18, 1976, during one of our visits (to the winter preserve), we were surprised to notice that a two inch thick branch of one of the oyamel trees had broken off, caused by the weight of the mass of butterflies clinging to it, and had fallen to the ground. As a result, the surrounding area was covered several inches deep with thousands of monarch butterflies that were unable to fly due to the low temperature of 34°F.

  “While we were examining the quivering mass of butterflies, much to our amazement we found one bearing a white tag. This was indeed a remarkable coincidence since of over a thousand trees laden with monarchs, this particular branch had one of our associates’ tagged specimens on it. We eagerly returned to our base and telephoned to the University of Toronto. After considerable difficulty, since making international telephone calls from rural Mexico is complicated, we finally managed to reach our office where the secretary looked up the record. Much to our delight we learned that butterfly PS397 had been tagged by Jim Gilbert, with the help of Dean Boen and Jim Street, at Chaska, Minnesota, at the University of Minnesota’s arboretum.”

  THE TAG FROM Minnesota was not the first one recovered in the winter colony. Ken Brugger had found another the year before, a discovery Urquhart was not interested in publicizing. “It belonged to a kid in Austin,” Brugger said. “He had made his own tags. They were big and clunky, but they worked. I told Urquhart that the first tagged butterfly I found was from this boy. I went to visit the boy and his parents when I was in Austin. He was a nice boy, very interested in butterflies. I asked Urquhart if I could bring him along when I went back to the colonies. Urquhart refused. He wouldn’t let me.” Nor did he report this discovery in the annual newsletter, Brugger said, since the boy was not one of the Urquharts’ associates. Then, a year later, Fred Urquhart found the monarch from Minnesota with one of his tags on it. That story was big news.

  It was one thing to know that there were millions of butterflies clinging to trees on the side of a ten-thousand-foot mountain in Mexico. It was quite another to know that one of those butterflies had come from the northern reaches of the United States, 1,750 miles away. The monarch had been tagged four months before Professor Urquhart found it. Here, at last, was conclusive proof that North American monarch butterflies migrated, and that they spent the winter alive, not dormant, clinging to fir trees, waiting out the cold.

  Chapter 5

  PROOF, in science, is a dissembling concept. It suggests one thing, the truth, and means something else: conjecture. Granted, the conjecture is based on evidence, but conjecture of any kind is still an approximation, a best guess. So when Fred and Norah Urquhart happened upon the monarch butterfly tagged by Jim Gilbert and his friends, all they knew for sure was that a single monarch had gone from Minnesota to Mexico. About the other millions of butterflies in the air and in the trees and on the ground they could say nothing at all.

  Soon enough, however, the evidence began to mount. More tags were found, and each one reinforced the supposition that the monarchs in the oyamel forests of Mexico had come from the United States and Canada. It was a guess, yes, but a guess that seemed less speculative as time went on. While the Gilbert butterfly, and the hundreds of recoveries after it, revealed a consistent pattern of monarchs moving from north to south each fall, that was all they revealed. They did not prove that the butterflies reached the Transvolcanics intentionally, through directed flight. And they did not “prove” that there had been a migration. Migration is a story that seems to be true, that many hope is true (it’s heroic, exciting, against all odds), and that indeed may be true. But it may not be true, too.

  IF THE URQUHARTS acknowledged this uncertainty, they weren’t saying so. “We, as a dedicated group of Research Associates, can take credit … not only in following the migration but also in bringing this unique phenomenon to the attention of the public,” they wrote in their 1988 Insect Migration Report. “So year after year, we delve even deeper and deeper into the life of the monarch butterfly.”

  Accurate though that was then, it would not be so for much longer. It had been more than thirty years since the Urquharts recruited their first associates, and they were tired. By the early 1990s they had had enough.

  “Fred decided that he wanted to slow down a bit,” recalled Don Davis, their most avid helper. “They were in their eighties and were still getting twelve thousand pieces of mail a year. I agreed that the project should decline, but I still wanted to tag. They did not support this at the time. It was their project, and t
hey ran it; if they said tagging was over, it was over. So after working together for twenty-seven years or so, our contact basically ended.”

  Tagging itself, however, did not end. Davis had his own labels printed up, as did a few other research associates, and continued to carry on. While some of these tags were recovered in Mexico, it was a limited and idiosyncratic effort at best. The necessary populism of the Insect Migration Association, which had drawn together thousands of people who had little in common but an interest in the most common of butterflies, was gone. And with it went the spirit of the effort, the basic ecology of people scattered across the map recognizing, through a small insect, their relation to one another, and to the land, and to the elements.

  LINCOLN BROWER, TOO, had his own tags printed, not to continue the work of the Urquharts but to improve upon it. Brower was unimpressed by the kind of science the Urquharts had been practicing with their research associates. It was too fuzzy, he thought, and too impressionistic, to be of much value. That was when he was being generous about it. When he was not, which was often, he considered it an “amateurish, self-serving approach to biology that isn’t science.”

  But Brower, more than anyone one else, knew that this approach was what had always distinguished monarch research and had, in fact, advanced it. Perhaps because they were seen in large groups, or perhaps because they moved over a sizable territory, monarch butterflies had caught the attention of amateur naturalists—direct heirs to the English tradition of field studies—for generations. Indeed, as Lincoln Brower noted in a monograph written in 1994, “the story of the monarch butterfly is a result of the combined observations of professional and amateur lepidopterists over more than a century.”

  It began with Charles Riley, an Englishman who emigrated to the United States in the nineteenth century and served for years as the official entomologist of Missouri. Like Fred Urquhart, Riley relied on field observers, in his case randomly dispersed across the state, to supplement his own observations. Monarchs were of particular interest. Not only did they appear to congregate, they seemed to move in a consistent way across the Midwest. As Brower told it, “The accumulation of anecdotal notes of monarch swarms from the prairie across the Great Lake States to New England, supplemented by frequent newspaper and signal officer reports of swarms passing over Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, and Texas, finally convinced Riley that the monarch indeed performs a bird-like fall migration.” And that wasn’t all. Riley also proposed that the butterflies’ likely destination was the southern timber forests. A century later, when Fred Urquhart picked up Jim Gilbert’s butterfly, Riley was shown to be right.