Four Wings and a Prayer (23 page)

A
T SOME POINT,
of course, the monarchs that flew down the eastern seaboard and then to Mexico had to swing inland. Maybe they turned in the Carolinas, or maybe they hugged the coast to the thumbnail of Florida, where, confronted with open water and its maniacal choice, ocean or gulf, they chose the gulf. Whatever their course, there was still no evidence to support either notion, just the tantalizing fact that some coastal monarchs found their way, somehow, to El Rosario.

“It’s a real enigma, the flow of monarch butterflies down the East Coast,” Chip Taylor said to me again one day when I was visiting the Monarch Watch office in Lawrence. “Why do we have these big holes?” He pointed to the map of tagged monarch recoveries, the one that had no red pinpoints anywhere in the Southeast. “The longitudinal data are great, but the recoveries don’t meet up with our expectations regarding latitude.” He tapped the hole in the map with his pen. “The butterflies ought to be turning right.”

It was the Big Right Turn theory again, a conclusion the data merely hinted at. David Gibo had gone in search of its coordinates in his ultralight airplane and failed to find them. Chip Taylor had distributed hundreds of thousands of Monarch Watch tags, but none had ever shown up in Mexico
from any southeastern state. Now he was on to something else. Or rather, his colleague Sandra Perez was. The year before she had taken Kansas butterflies to Washington, D.C., and Dalton, Georgia, and released them to see which way they went; all had behaved as if they were in Kansas, flying southwesterly. Now she was going back to repeat the experiment, but with a difference: this time she was going to cage the monarchs in situ for a few days, on the theory that they might need a little time in their new neighborhoods to figure out how to read the local cues.

“I still expect them to behave the way they would if they were in Kansas and go southwest, but Chip expects them to adjust for their new orientation and fly more westerly,” Perez said. More westerly would suggest the Big Right Turn.

As she talked, Perez took a quick inventory of the materials arrayed on the table in the biology annex, located on West Campus, in a trailer she shared with a postdoc who studied crickets: plastic hangers, toothbrush holders, duct tape, pieces of wood. Perez was making artificial nectar feeders for the butterflies she planned to keep in captivity. For as long as they were with her, they’d be treated to a cocktail of Gatorade and protein, served from a soaked, colored kitchen sponge. The feeders held the sponges.

“What I love about field biology is that I can get all my equipment at Wal-Mart,” Perez said, bridging two hangers with a piece of wood that she then secured with a length of duct tape. That done, she taped the top of a toothbrush holder onto the wood. This would cradle the sponge.

“When the migrants come through I collect several hundred at a time,” she said, tearing strips of tape and hanging them off the side of the table. “This many feeders is probably
excessive, but I don’t want anyone to be hungry in there.” She motioned for me to start taping the wood to a hanger. Production swung into high gear.

“I’m sure one of the biological supply houses sells something like this premade,” she said after a while, “but this is a lot cheaper. And a lot more fun.”

B
UT IF THE HANGERS,
the toothbrush holders, the sponges, and even the tents where the captives would be housed could be bought at Wal-Mart, Perez was still missing the one thing she could not buy there: butterflies. Specifically, nonreproductive migrating butterflies. Migrants were as scarce in Lawrence that fall as they were in the Adirondacks and Toronto and Cape May. The Baker Wetlands, not far from the university campus, a reliable roost for migrating monarchs in years past, was now as empty as a condemned building. We saw just twenty of them in a quarter-mile stretch on which on an average day the year before we would have seen ten thousand. That order of magnitude could not be explained away. “They’ve never been this late before,” Chip Taylor said of the monarchs. But he couldn’t say where exactly they were, or where they’d be coming from.

He had a hunch, though. When you needed migrating monarchs in Kansas, there was one sure place to go: Wamego. There was a high school biology teacher there, Terry Callender, whose students had tagged more monarch butterflies than any other group. One year, twenty or so kids had captured, measured, weighed, tagged, and released an unprecedented twelve thousand monarchs. They’d had a lot of recoveries, too. Terry’s classroom, Chip said, represented the best of what
Monarch Watch had to offer students. If they had monarchs there, he was sure they would share. Sandra and I consulted a map. Wamego looked to be about two hours away, between Topeka and Manhattan, on Highway 24. We gathered nets, extension poles, envelopes, and high-beam flashlights. The high beams were key, Sandra explained, since we’d be jacklighting the butterflies.

“Isn’t that poaching?” I wondered aloud.

Sandra looked at me with amusement. “This is
science,”
she said, laughing.

T
ERRY
C
ALLENDER
, an affable, bearish man with a neatly trimmed beard and gray hair, waved us into his classroom in the basement of Wamego High. It was the end of the day, and students were gathered by his desk waiting to sign out butterfly nets while Callender, wearing a faded Monarch Watch T-shirt, teased them.

“If you want to get out of science process class on Friday, bring in a thousand monarchs and we’ll have too much to do to do anything else,” he told them. They nodded earnestly.

Terry turned to us. “We usually do five or six hundred per class. They get really efficient, especially if we shut down the class. Sometimes a single student will bring in five hundred or even a thousand butterflies. For some reason we always get a lot of monarchs here. It can get really wild. Two years ago we had eight hundred we had to feed because it was too cold for them to fly. Sometimes we get so many butterflies that I don’t teach the entire day and we just tag the whole time. It’s like a factory. When school started this fall the kids came in and said, ‘When do we get to tag?’ I’d never heard that before. They are really into it.”

On the wall over the sink in Terry’s classroom was this message: “I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.” One look around and it was obvious that nothing could better describe his educational philosophy. In a run-of-the-mill school in a rural midwestern backwater, Callender was pioneering the kind of hands-on, experiential learning favored by progressive educational reformers in more sophisticated places. There were waders piled up in one corner so kids could explore the creeks that ran to the Kansas River, which flowed alongside the town, and piles of butterfly nets, and rows of microscopes, and a freshwater aquarium. A paper wasps’ nest hung from the ceiling, and there were animal skulls and duck decoys. Terry Callender was a hunter, and it showed—not just in the veritable museum of taxidermy that also crowded the walls of his classroom, but in the patient, observant, expectant attitude he brought to the study of wild things.

“Divide yourselves into groups of threes and fours,” he told the students when they had returned to their seats. “I’ll be right back.” And he was, carrying a box of envelopes he had just taken out of the refrigerator.

“OK. You are going to put a tag on each butterfly and write down its number in the log. Then you are going to write down whether it is male or female. How do you tell the difference?”

“Something about the veins,” one boy offered.

“Well, yes, there is something to that,” the teacher said, “since the veins tend to be thicker on the females than on the males. But there’s something else. Look at my shirt.” The kids stared at his shirt, which meant staring at his substantial middle, which made a couple of them giggle.

“That one,” a girl with long blond hair and braces said, pointing to one of the butterflies. “It’s a male.”

Terry Callender beamed. “Right,” he said. “See the dot? It’s the pheromone sac. There’s some controversy about whether it’s functional or not, but only the males have them. Right. OK. When you’re doing the log, I need you to write down wind speed—it’s calm today; temperature—it’s in the mid eighties; and the wing condition on a scale of one to four, where one is fresh and four is almost transparent because the scales have fallen off. When you’re done, call for a runner—I need volunteers—and give your monarch to them and they’ll go outside and release the butterfly.”

The students broke into groups, girls with girls, boys with boys, and before long the room was percussive.
It’s a one. Male. I think it’s a two. Male. Female. Two. No, one. Runner, we need a runner. Female. Female. Two. Runner.
The bell rang. A few kids with buses to catch took off. A bunch of others stayed. It was last period. The halls were filled with students eager to leave the building. Callender’s students remained in their seats, sexing the butterflies. “They just can’t seem to get enough of this,” he said.

That Terry Callender’s students even had any monarchs to tag was evidence, he said, of their interest in the project. In past years the butterflies had been plentiful in Wamego—he recalled sending his own six-year-old into the front yard with a net, and the boy’s returning a few minutes later with over a hundred monarchs—but this year they were scarce, coming in sporadically, not hanging around.

“This is the first time in four years that they haven’t been here on the tenth of September in big, big numbers,” he said. “Four years isn’t a long time, but still, I think we were seeing a trend.” We made plans to meet up again later, after the sun went down, in the city park.

W
HERE
I
CAME FROM
, jacklighting was the lazy way to bag a deer. Guys would troll the back roads in their pickups, shining bright lights into the edge of the forest, hoping to catch the reflection of a buck’s eyes. The light would pin him there, and the guys wouldn’t even have to get out of their truck. They’d just rest the rifle on the window ledge and shoot.

Jacklighting monarchs, Sandra Perez assured me, was nothing like that. For one thing it wasn’t illegal. For another, it wasn’t the light that paralyzed them; it was the temperature. They were already unable to move before the light was shined on them. This, it seemed to me, was a debater’s point.

“We’re going to shine the light under the branches and look for roosts,” she said, ignoring my objections. “Sometimes they’re hard to see. You have to be careful not to miss them because they blend in so well.”

“It doesn’t look good,” Terry Callender said when we met up with him in the park. It was nine o’clock, and the reason he thought it did not look good was that his students had been out on the streets of Wamego for an hour and a half; he was pretty sure the town was already picked over. But then we walked a little farther into the park and Sandra shined a light on the underside of a silver maple and there, as if she were projecting it, was a small cluster of monarchs, crowding the branch like rush-hour straphangers on the Broadway Local.

“We’ll snag them later,” Terry said, hustling us out of the park and down a pleasant residential street of small houses with big porches. “We need to get to Mrs. Bradford’s yard before the kids do. There are always monarchs there. Why that yard? Why those trees? There is no apparent reason. We
tried to determine if they prefer one kind of tree to another, but they don’t seem to.”

We walked briskly, the sound of our footfalls seeming to precede us. There was no traffic; the streets were quiet, the houses welcoming. Muslin curtains, yellow light, roofs overhung by old, old trees.

Mrs. Bradford’s trees looked like all the others. We inspected the one out front, then walked around to the back of the house. Terry Callender waved to Mrs. Bradford, who was on the phone inside. She hung up and came out just as Sandra was demonstrating her net-swiping technique. It was very smooth. Thirty monarchs tumbled into her clutches.

“Nice,” Terry Callender said.

Some of his students appeared just then, walking out of the shadows as if they’d been summoned by an inaudible buzzer.

“What did you get?” they wanted to know—meaning “how many?”

“They’re keeping score,” Sandra whispered.

“Where have you been?” their teacher asked them. A few of them hedged; one said the city park; all of them began to drift away.

“It gets pretty competitive,” Terry explained. “They won’t even tell
me
where the best roosts are.”

B
ACK IN THE CITY PARK
at around ten, Callender’s students kneeled on the grass comparing their hauls.

“I only got a hundred and fifty,” said a skinny freshman boy wearing a Kansas State windbreaker.

“A hundred and ten,” said a junior girl in a University of Kansas sweatshirt.

Terry shook his head. “Sorry we couldn’t do better for you, ladies,” he apologized to us. Then he spoke to his students: “OK, kids, how about handing over your envelopes to Dr. Perez?” They looked at him with a mixture of astonishment and betrayal. Hand over their butterflies? What was he thinking?