Four Wings and a Prayer (25 page)

That night I put my question to Bill Calvert, who was patiently gluing dead monarchs onto a strip of cardboard. “You’re probably right,” he said, shrugging. “But it was pretty great, wasn’t it?”

Knowledge can be passed along from person to person like a baton in a race, but the pursuit of knowledge, and love for the pursuit of knowledge, that particular passion, can only be chosen. This, I think, was what Bill Calvert was hinting at, or what I wanted him to mean.

T
HERE WERE MONARCHS
migrating through at Selah, but not many, not enough, and not in the kinds of numbers that might make an impression. So the campers were loaded into vans and Bill Calvert got into his truck. He knew a place a few hours away, a reliable roost at Garner State Park. It would be an overnight field trip.

Sandra Perez had arrived that afternoon on her way to a meeting farther south, so she came along, too. Her Georgia experiment was finished, the monarch season was nearly over, and neither had gone exactly the way anyone might have predicted. Soon Perez would have to get on with her real work, her postdoc on ants. If there was going to be a valedictory to
this elusive generation of monarchs, this would be the last chance.

It was a long drive into the heart of the hill country, through Twin Sisters and Comfort, along the Guadalupe River and under the junipers in its fertile valley. It was nearly dark when the group arrived at Garner State Park, and Calvert hustled everyone into the woods. In the quickening night, students and teachers gathered around him—first a ring of students, then a ring of teachers. The question of the moment had to do with roost formation, Bill explained. Monarchs roosted in groups. Were they attracted to big clusters, to small clusters, or to no clusters at all? He held up one of the strips of dead monarchs he had been assembling the night before. A dozen open-winged butterflies were crowded together on it, back to front, like moviegoers queued on opening night.

“We’ll use these as decoys,” Bill said, showing how to attach a strip to a tree branch so it hung along the bias in the right direction. “We’re going to observe whether, when the monarchs see the clusters, they’ll try to join the roost.”

For the tree climbers among the group it was an opportune time to show off. Up they went, shimmying out on the limbs of live oaks to fasten the decoys onto the leaves. For those who couldn’t climb, the decoys were placed at arm’s height on pecan trees—a design flaw, no doubt, since monarchs were not likely to roost so low. But that was beside the point. Fifteen minutes passed, then twenty-five. The occasional monarch fell through the canopy and flew about, but most of those that did just left again, and none made even a wink at the decoy clusters. The experiment was canceled on account of the fact that the visiting team did not show up. Nor did the home team, for that matter.

“From the reports I was getting, I would have guessed that there were gobs and gobs of monarchs here recently,” Bill Calvert said apologetically. “We must be in the trough of the wave. It’s too bad, but it’s nature.”

“L
ET’S GET OUT
of here and go to Del Rio,” I said to Sandra Perez then, though it was after nine and Del Rio, the Texas town on the Mexican border through which millions of monarchs regularly passed on their way to the other side, was at least four hours away. As a child I had often read the last page of a book when I was in the thick of it, and even when I hadn’t, that last page had still been there to be resisted or given in to. Del Rio was the final page of this year’s volume on monarchs, and though it wouldn’t conclude anything, really, I suddenly needed to get there.

We drove through the night trying to outdistance the butterflies, somewhere acquiring a bottle of scotch and a block of cheese and a cheap motel room containing a mismatched set of dinner plates. I had seen butterflies before. I had seen gobs and gobs of butterflies before, but for me this trip to the border was like skipping to the end of the book. It had been months since the monarchs had left Mexico, and I just wanted to know one thing: Were they here? Were the butterflies I hadn’t seen in the Adirondacks and at Cape May and in Toronto and Lawrence up in the sky? It wouldn’t
mean
anything if they were or if they weren’t, not in a scientific way, but it would mean something to me. I had been watching monarchs for years. Their story was part of mine, and I wanted to
know,
as if knowledge were a promise, not a set of facts.

I
N THE MORNING
we continued on for another forty-five miles, to Seminole Canyon, a limestone basin out on Route 90. It was raining lightly, and the sky was overcast, and the wind was blowing from the southeast—not ideal conditions for a monarch butterfly.

“Last year there were millions here in the tree by the ranger’s station,” a man in a camper told us when we asked if he’d seen any butterflies. “This year they’ve just been filtering through the canyon, out of the wind.” He directed us to get back in the car and drive down to where the Pecos River met the Rio Grande.

The rain was played out. We drove in silence, down a steep hill to a dry riverbed where sheer rock walls rose up from the ground like battlements. It was quiet down there. The grasses had grown high but couldn’t quite cover the rusted cans and yellowed plastic bottles that littered the ground. Nature had reasserted itself, but not enough. We stepped over an abandoned boat launch and followed a path down to the bottom. There was no wind. Not a lick. No one was around. It was better that way.

We climbed back up and sat on a stone jetty. I handed my binoculars to Sandra, who leaned back and lifted them to her eyes. The last page was upon us, and I wanted her to tell me what was written there. Without a word she handed the glasses back to me. The sky was steel gray. Mexico was a short swim away. Air was a fluid. I took a look, and then another, and settled in to look some more. There they were, the monarchs, a steady stream of them, twenty-three, forty-four, one hundred and nine, and then I lost count.

Of the many books and articles I have read about monarch butterfly migration, the first, Fred Urquhart’s
The Monarch Butterfly: International Traveler
(William Caxton, Ltd.), remains one of the most interesting from a historical perspective, in chronicling the Urquharts’ early efforts to understand monarch migration. A more comprehensive history of the quest to track these butterflies, as well as an introduction to the naturalists whose quest it has been, may be found in Lincoln P. Brower’s definitive essay “Understanding and Misunderstanding the Migration of the Monarch Butterfly in North America, 1857–1994,” in the
Journal of the Lepidopterists’ Society,
no. 49 (1995). Although they are too numerous to list here, Brower’s scientific writings, which touch on almost every aspect of monarch biology and behavior, are essential reading for anyone hoping to gain more than a superficial understanding of
Danaus plexippus.
For example, his early collaborations with Jane Brower, published in
Ecology,
no. 43 (1962), and the
Journal of the Lepidopterists’ Society,
no. 15 (1961), among others, provide useful background on mimicry and are resonant with his later articles written with
Linda Fink (
Nature,
no. 291 [1981]) and J. N. Seiber et al. (
Journal of Chemical Ecology,
nos. 10 [1984] and 8 [1981]), on cardenolides. Lincoln Brower’s work with William Calvert (in the
Journal of the Lepidopterists’ Society,
nos. 46 [1992], 43 [1989], and 40 [1986];
Biotropica,
no. 15 [1983]; and
Science,
no. 204 [1979], to name just a few) opens wide a window on the Mexican overwintering sites and the dangers faced by monarch butterflies there.

The two large and exhaustive volumes on biology, sociology, and conservation that have come out of the three international symposia on monarch butterflies held in 1981, 1986, and 1997 are crucial from both scientific and historical standpoints. These are
Biology and Conservation of the Monarch Butterfly,
edited by Stephen Malcolm and Myron Zalucki (Science Series no. 38, Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County), and the
Proceedings of the 1997 North American Conference on the Monarch Butterfly,
edited by Jurgen Hoth, Leticia Merino, Karen Oberhauser et al. (Commission for Environmental Cooperation, Montreal, Canada). A more accessible (and beautifully illustrated) introduction to monarchs is Eric Grace’s
The World of the Monarch Butterfly
(Sierra Club Books); also recommended is Kathryn Lasky’s children’s book
Monarchs
(Gulliver Books).

In the midst of all this prose, I have taken solace in Alison Hawthorne Deming’s
The Monarchs: A Poem Sequence
(Louisiana State University Press) and in the work of the esteemed Mexican poet Homero Aridjis, whose collection
Exaltation of Light
is available in English. While the poetry of Aridjis’s good friend W. S. Merwin provided many wonderful literary diversions, his essay on monarch butterflies in
Orion
magazine (Winter 1996) was critical to this project.

In many ways my interest in monarchs was piqued by a number of magnificent books about birds. These included Kenn Kaufman’s
Kingbird Highway: The Story of a Natural Obsession That Got Out of Hand
(Houghton Mifflin), Jonathan Weiner’s
The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time
(Vintage Books), Christopher Cokinos’s
Hope Is the Thing with Feathers: A Personal Chronicle of Vanishing Birds
(Jeremy Tarcher), Paul Kerlinger’s
How Birds Migrate
(Stackpole Books), and Scott Weidensaul’s
Living on the Wind: Across the Hemisphere with Migratory Birds
(North Point Press). Werner Nachtigall’s entomological study
Insects in Flight
also nudged my
increasing preoccupation with both aviation and butterflies, as did the work of Gary Paul Nabhan, especially
The Forgotten Pollinators
(with Stephen Buchmann, Island Press) and Sue Hubbell’s
Broadsides from the Other Orders: A Book of Bugs
(Houghton Mifflin).

Three field guides proved invaluable:
The Audubon Society Handbook for Butterfly Watchers
(Scribner’s), by Robert Michael Pyle; the same author’s
Audubon Field Guide to North American Butterflies
(Knopf); and Jeffrey Glassberg’s
Butterflies through Binoculars
(Oxford). The work of Professor Adrian Wenner on monarchs, honeybees, and epistemology offered a necessary and provocative challenge to the “truth” of monarch research in particular and of science in general. Particularly helpful were his book
Anatomy of a Controversy: The Question of a “Language” among Bees
(with Patrick Wells; Columbia University Press) and a number of as-yet-unpublished responses to the orientation experiments by Sandra Perez and Chip Taylor described in their paper “The Sun Compass in Monarch Butterflies”
(Nature,
no. 387, [1997]). Wenner’s studies of California monarchs supplied a useful perspective on the West Coast population, as did
Monarch News,
a monthly newsletter published by California Monarch Studies, a not-for-profit organization run by the avid and prolific San Diego lepidopterist David Marriott. By far the most intimate and insightful understanding of western monarch behavior, and of the quaint and obsessive behavior of one of our great entomologists, is to be found in Robert Michael Pyle’s personal epic
Chasing Monarchs: A Migration with the Butterflies of Passage
(Houghton Mifflin). Even farther west, University of Hawaii professor John Stimson’s pioneering research on white monarchs introduced me to genetic mutation, polymorphism, and the role of predation in biological diversity.

Resources available on the Internet have been essential to this project and will, I wager, play an increasing role in the collection and dissemination of knowledge about monarchs. The University of Kansas’s Monarch Watch Web site (
www.monarchwatch.org
) and its e-mail discussion group, D-Plex, as well as the organization’s newsletter, are the crossroads for almost all monarch enthusiasts, whether professional or amateur. Monarch Watch, along with Journey North (
www.learner.org/jnorth
), not only track the movement of monarchs but also archive vital scientific papers and historical data. Both sites were of inestimable value to me.

I also relied on the systematic longitudinal data on the eastern coastal migration collected by Dick Walton’s Monarch Monitoring Project, formerly called the Monarch Migration Association of North America (
www.concord.org/~dick/mon.html
), and on the comprehensive account of flying and gliding, wind and weather, provided on David Gibo’s “Tactics and Vectors” Web site (
www.erin.utoronto.ca/~w3gibo
), which also shares data on monarch movements and corollary meteorological conditions relayed by pilots. For information on the effect of genetically altered corn pollen on monarch larvae, I consulted the Website run by the University of Iowa’s entomology department (
www.ent.iastate.edu
). The eponymous “butterflywebsite” (
www.butterflywebsite.com
), which is run by commercial breeders, not only offered insight into the controversial world of butterfly farming, it supplied an extensive list of butterfly houses around the world, online reference material about butterflies and moths, and links to international entomological organizations. Finally, the University of Minnesota’s Monarch Lab (
www.monarchlab.umn.edu
) provided curricular information, archival data, experimental data, and, perhaps most important, links to the ever-expanding universe of monarch biology.