Four Wings and a Prayer (24 page)

He tried again. “She needs them for an experiment she’s doing. In Georgia.”

Even so—give away their butterflies?

Reluctantly, they did.

T
HE EXPERIMENT
almost worked. Perez sent collapsible tents and eighty butterflies packed on ice to a friend in the Washington, D.C., area, three days ahead of her own arrival. When she got there she was carrying an additional eighty monarchs. The next day she released them all and recorded which way they went. It wasn’t a blind study—she knew which group was which, a factor that might have influenced the results—but the acclimatized ones did shift their orientation a little to the west, heading inland. It was a small shift, but statistically significant enough to warrant Perez’s handing over a bottle of Dos Equis to Chip Taylor.

Georgia was a different matter altogether. Hurricane George was moving up the coast and Perez wasn’t sure there would be enough time to acclimate the butterflies before the wind and rain began. So this time she brought both groups of monarchs with her, releasing the wild Kansas butterflies first, then waiting a few days before releasing the second set. The Kansas butterflies flew southwest. The others tended to the west, but only very slightly. It was inconclusive. When she did the distributions, Perez noticed something else, too. About half of the
second group of butterflies were doing something totally un-predicted. They were heading south
east,
toward the ocean. To Sandra Perez this meant only one thing: she’d have to go back the next year and do the experiment again.

A
DAY AWAY
from Washington, D.C., as the monarch flies, in the Blue Ridge Mountains, Lincoln Brower was brooding. It was the end of the third week of September 1998, and no rain had fallen for nearly a month. He was standing at the Greenstone Overlook, at three thousand feet, looking down into the Shenandoah Valley. “Not one monarch,” he said, shaking his head. “Nothing. Amazing.” He got back into his car and continued on the Blue Ridge Parkway, then cut over to Skyline Drive, conducting an informal inventory. Loft Mountain, Big Run, Rockytop Ridge, Patterson Ridge—no monarchs. “Populations normally fluctuate tenfold,” he said, driving down from Rocky Mountain. “If you had a hundred and fifty per man hour last year, fifteen would be low but within an accepted range. This year it’s more like one point five.”

Brower got out of the car and scanned the sky with his binoculars. In the three hours he had been driving around he had seen not a single monarch. “I don’t know when it becomes meaningful that it’s a bad year,” he said.

Chapter 10

B
ILL
C
ALVERT EASED
his truck off Interstate 281 near Johnson City, Texas, and headed out of town toward a spot on the map that appeared to be blank. Half an hour later he crossed over a cattle grate and under a sign that said Selah Ranch and proceeded along the scrub, past the live oaks, up to the main house. It was a few weeks shy of a year since our trip to Morelia. The same cassette tapes were sitting on the dashboard of his truck, waiting to be played. The same coverless, well-thumbed paperback
Random House Dictionary
was tucked under the seat. The same truck, nineteen thousand miles later. The nets, the roll of duct tape, the extension poles, the digital scale were all in the truckbed. Even the clothes Bill Calvert had on were the same. The changes had occurred elsewhere, away from the migratory part of his life, which remained constant.

It had been a bad year for monarchs, but not for Bill Calvert. He had his study site, his trips to Mexico; he had data to collate, papers to write. The ebb and flow of butterfly populations were background noise, at least so far. He had heard them before. It was enough to do the work.

Selah, where Calvert arrived at midafternoon, was a five-thousand-acre environmental education center in the Texas hill country. When Bill Calvert drove into the parking lot, he was greeted by Karen Oberhauser, Liz Goehring, and Sonia Altizer of the University of Minnesota. For the next six days they would be colleagues at what Calvert was calling Monarch Camp. It was Karen Oberhauser’s show, really, part of her Minnesota-based Monarch Monitoring Project. The idea was to teach teachers and students together how to do science. Oberhauser, a Harvard graduate who’d been a schoolteacher before getting her doctorate, understood that for the most part teachers did not like to teach science. It scared them. The best way to demystify it, she thought, was to have them
do
it. The members of the group had already gotten together once, in Minnesota, and since then had been working on research projects. They would be continuing these at Selah and seeing the migration, too.

“In Minnesota we focused on breeding ecology and behavior,” Oberhauser reminded the group. In shorts, sneakers, and a T-shirt, she looked the part of head counselor; the hand lens she was wearing on a lanyard around her neck could have been a whistle. “This week we’re going to focus on migration, the nonbreeding part of the life cycle.” She handed over the proceedings to Bill Calvert, introducing him as, among other things, the man who had found the Mexican overwintering sites. The young people, eager always to be touched by celebrity, sat up and took notice.

Calvert described a Texas flyway, three hundred miles wide from Wichita Falls to Eagle Pass, and talked about fall migration patterns and the spring remigration, about fire-ant predation, about how monarchs rode the updrafts along the spine of the Sierra Madre Oriental. The students listened politely, but what they wanted to know about more than anything was Calvert’s initial discovery of the overwintering sites.

“The local people in Mexico thought the monarchs were coming there to die,” he said. “They also thought the migrants were the souls of dead children. They usually began to arrive on November second, All Souls’ Day.” His audience laughed nervously. Butterflies were … butterflies. How could they be something—someone—else? But the students had been learning to do science using the null hypothesis, so they knew that the question could also be asked like this: How could the butterflies
not
be something—someone—else?

H
OW DO PEOPLE KNOW
what they know? This is always the question. The world presents itself: the sky is blue, the birds are singing. Our senses are an open window. A breeze is always blowing through. How do we know what cannot be proved? The answer is as unsatisfying as it is true: We just do. There are times when this is enough, and times when it is discomfiting. Recognition of a world that is not the familiar, material one is unsettling; it is hard enough to keep track of this world. Science, like belief, starts with wonder, and wonder starts with a question. As Bill Calvert would have told the students, answers did not dispel the wonder, they reinforced it. Answers begot questions, and questions were the libido of intelligence. How better to describe the endless pursuit of knowledge than passion?

T
HE QUESTION AT
Monarch Camp the next day was how to test whether or not magnetism was a factor in monarch butterfly orientation. It was two-thirty in the afternoon, eighty-six degrees, with a slow wind boiling up out of the east. The students and teachers sat at picnic tables, pencils in hand as Liz Goehring and Sonia Altizer delivered a crash course in how to ask questions that could be answered by science.

“We’re all brand new at studying orientation,” Liz said, “so let’s set up an experiment to figure out the effect of geomagnetism on the butterflies. What would be a good question to frame this investigation?”

“ ‘Will a strong magnetic pulse affect orientation?’ “ someone asked.

“Good,” said Goehring. “That will work. We’ve got two kinds of monarchs—ones that have been raised in a greenhouse and wild ones—and we are going to expose only some of them to a magnetic pulse to confuse their polarity, so we’ll have a control group. Can you think of a second question we should be looking at?”

“ ‘Will wild monarchs respond differently to being pulsed than ones raised in a greenhouse?’ “ a girl with a honeyed Texas accent asked.

Liz nodded her head yes. She wrote down the question. “So what do you expect will happen?”

The students raised their hands. “The wild ones that haven’t been pulsed will fly to the southwest,” one of them said.

“What about the other group?”

The participants weren’t sure, so they settled on a random distribution: those butterflies might go anywhere.

“Let’s find out,” Liz said eagerly, directing everyone across the dirt road to an open field. Sonia was there already, surreptitiously exposing butterflies to a magnet so no one would know which monarchs were which. Launchpads (aka kitchen sponges) were distributed, and binoculars and compasses, too. Log sheets were drawn. The group arrayed itself across the field in pairs, and each pair was handed a butterfly in an envelope. They all studied their specimens and began recording information in their logs. Julia Goldberg, an eighth-grader from Rochester, Minnesota, took her first butterfly, knelt down behind it, and placed it on the sponge, which was facing east.

“Here goes,” she said, letting loose its wings, which she had pinched together between her thumb and forefinger. She stepped back, expecting the monarch to rise up and make haste for the sky. But then a funny thing happened: the butterfly did not budge. It just sat on the sponge, casually—almost coquettishly—flapping its wings. A minute later it hopped off the sponge and pitched over into the grass. It looked drunk.

Julia released another butterfly and then another—eleven in all. Some took off immediately, heading south-southwest, a few lolled in the grass, and a couple more hung around the launchpad for a few minutes, then lifted off and aimed for the nearest tree. The same thing was happening all over the field. Maybe a dozen butterflies were scattered in the grass, and a bunch more were in the trees. As they sunned themselves, the data began to accumulate and a pattern began to emerge. It was like connect-the-dots before the last few numbers were reached: a picture was lurking there.

“Butterfly AA—what kind do you guess it is?” Liz asked
Julia, as the butterfly made no effort to move from its grassy perch.

“Wild, pulsed,” she said confidently.

Liz checked her own data sheet and looked up in amazement. “Yes!” she said. “What about butterfly C?”

Julia consulted her log. “Lab-raised, no pulse,” she ventured.

“Yes!” Liz said. “So what’s the pattern?”

The eighth-grade science student looked over her notes. The pulsed butterflies didn’t go anywhere, she explained; they just hung out in the grass. The unpulsed lab-raised monarchs didn’t go far at first either, but then, after warming themselves in the sun for a few minutes and shaking off the chill of the cooler in which they’d been kept, they flew off in no particular direction. In contrast, the unpulsed wild butterflies took off right away, heading southwest. Liz was excited. Julia was excited. Her guesses were right. She was as giddy as a stock picker whose system was working. If she was ever going to get hooked on science, this was the moment.

A look of concern, a small one, crossed Liz’s face. “It doesn’t always work out this neatly,” she cautioned. Julia and the other members of the group nodded responsibly. But then Liz was smiling again. The fact was, it
had
worked out. Who could say it wouldn’t again? The kids and teachers gave one another high-fives.

N
EAT AS THE
experiment had been, a problem began to nag at me. By then the students were on to other things, though the glow of success still hung over them. But the question for me was, what did it mean that butterflies exposed to a magnetic pulse fell headlong into the grass? Not, certainly,
that monarch butterflies used magnetism to orient themselves in flight. No experiment had yet been designed to prove that. All the experiment seemed to demonstrate was that monarchs had magnetite in their bodies that responded to a magnetic charge. But that was already well known. Interfering with a function did not prove that that function, when intact, was essential. Drinking alcohol would impair my ability to drive, for instance, but
not
drinking alcohol was not what enabled me to drive carefully (or not) at other times.