Four Wings and a Prayer (5 page)

“I think the butterflies may use those mountains as beacons, to guide them in,” Bill Calvert said casually, as though that thought had just popped into his head. But I had heard it before, in different versions, all of them his. We were taking the high road ourselves, on the spine of the Sierra Madre Oriental, then dropping into the valleys, because of this very notion—the idea that monarch butterflies might use these mountains as a focusing mechanism to set them on a narrow path leading to the preserves.

“A butterfly born in Minnesota and one born in New York State end up in the same intermontane valley because of this focusing device,” he said. “When they start out they’re spread two thousand miles across the continent, but when they get into Mexico they’re condensed into just fifty miles.
Wherever they join the mountain ranges of the Sierra Madre Oriental, they turn and follow it.”

That was the theory—the only one, Calvert said, that accounted for longitude in a monarch’s migration. The problem was that the hypothesis was basically unprovable. Calvert ticked off a list of questions that could be answered, it seemed, only by radio telemetry: “Where do monarchs hit the Neovolcanics? How accurate are these creatures, anyhow? How do they know when to stop? Are they really directional? There’s some evidence that suggests that they’re not.” But so far, sticking a radio transmitter on a monarch butterfly had not been an option—the devices didn’t come in that microdot size, and even if they did, using them would probably feel like cheating to an inveterate field biologist like Bill Calvert, a guy who made his own furniture, poured his own concrete, raised his own bees.

We pushed on, and the mountains got bigger, and as they did, Bill began looking at them and not at the sky, and it became clear that they were totems for him—totems to an earlier, less complicated life.

“Boy, I’ve spent so much time wandering these roads and climbing those mountains, looking for monarchs,” he’d say. Or, “People would ask me, ‘What good are monarchs?’ I hate this question. Basically it’s a matter of aesthetics. Either you love these creatures and this phenomenon, or you don’t.”

For more than two decades they had been the one constant affection in Bill Calvert’s life: a child’s life wedded to adult ambitions. Or maybe it was the other way around, an adult’s life wedded to a child’s ambitions. Either way it was seductive, this search of his, this responsibility to nothing but the questions. Where I came from, it was the answers that mattered most: had my daughter’s cough cleared up, had the
doctor called in the prescription, had this winter’s firewood been cut and stacked, had the paycheck arrived, was the phone bill paid? As I drove along with Bill Calvert, I sometimes made mental lists of these for the rare times when we’d find a phone and an operator willing to place a call across the border. For the most part, though, my questions became simpler and less answerable: “Where are the monarchs?” “Will we see monarchs?” These questions could be enough, I was learning from Bill, to build a life around.

T
EN MILES FROM
Coroneo we pulled over to get another set of azimuths. The monarchs should have been closing in on the overwintering sites, which were to our west, and the azimuths should have reflected this.
Should
have. But didn’t. The butterflies were going south. The monarchs were flying at about a thousand feet—high, barely visible. Calvert wondered if they were heading for San Andreas, a wintering area that in recent years had been ravaged by fires and logging. Who knew? We were in farmland that ended in a wall of mountains. Gunshots pop-popped somewhere close by. Un-fazed, Bill kept talking into his tape recorder, giving the azimuths. “It’s just a rifle,” he said, turning away from the machine to reassure me—saying, in effect, that we were hearing merely the call of an unremarkable bird. And as it turned out, he was right. In a nearby field, two boys were shooting at crows.

S
O WHAT IS DANGER
? For me it is a feeling, sensual and percussive and paralytic. For a butterfly it may be this, too—
we can’t begin to know—but it is also a constant condition, like weather. Indeed, weather itself presents one of the greatest dangers in a butterfly’s life, and particularly that of a migrating monarch butterfly, which covers thousands of miles through uplands and lowlands, across water and along coasts, in its journey south and then north again. Too cold and the monarch can’t fly, might freeze. Too hot and it gets overheated, can’t fly. Too hot and there might not be enough water. Too much wind, grounded. Wind from the southeast, stalled. Wind from the west, blown seaward. Hurricanes. Tornadoes. Snow. All present dangers, and not just to monarchs, but to their habitat as well. Of the 106 known species of milkweed, only about a dozen are used by monarchs as sites on which to lay their eggs. The milkweed is essential, for it provides the cardiac glycosides—the poisons—that are ingested by monarch caterpillars and that in turn make monarch butterflies poisonous to most birds. Although perhaps hardier than the monarchs themselves, milkweed plants nonetheless need adequate rain, but not too much rain, and adequate sunshine, but not too much sunshine, in order to grow. They are weather-dependent, too. The absence of suitable habitat for breeding, migrating, or overwintering breaks a link in the chain and puts monarchs at risk.

So do predators, which are numerous: wasps, fire ants, earwigs, aphids, rodents, birds, and, in their own way, people. Cows like to eat monarchs: Mexican farmers used to bring cattle up to the overwintering grounds and smoke the butterflies to the ground, where the cows would eat them by the thousands. Mice like monarchs. Once I was raising a newly hatched monarch whose crumpled right forewing made it unable to fly. Day after day it would sit in my kitchen
sucking up sugar water from a saturated sponge. It was there as usual on a Thursday night and then, suddenly, not there the next morning—totally absent unless you counted the mouse droppings on the counter not far from the sponge. And raptors, which you might assume would have bigger fish to fry, like—as in “find tasty”—monarchs, too. Watch a thermaling sharp-shinned hawk through binoculars and you’re likely to catch sight of a thermaling monarch in the same funnel of wind, but only for a minute if the hawk happens to be hungry.

To call people predators is perhaps a stretch, but only if you assume that predation requires intent. For the most part, people are monarch butterfly predators not by design but by default, as when they mow a highway median strip at the wrong time and eliminate thousands of acres of accessible milkweeds; or when they plant genetically modified corn infused with a toxin aimed at killing corn borers, which also, through its pollen, kills monarch caterpillars; or when they spray crops with herbicides and pesticides; or when they cut down trees in the Mexican overwintering sites, thinning the protective canopy and altering the microclimate it creates, which together allow the butterflies to survive both the cold and the breakfast-time raids of orioles and other birds of this particular emetic appetite. It’s the same old ecological story: everything is connected.

The fact that the process is circular, not linear, poses its own danger, too. What I mean is this: it’s easier to identify problems that arise in causal relationships and then to address, if not remove, them. If your boyfriend hits you, for example, you can leave him and no longer be in the path of his blows; it may not be that simple a relationship to leave, but you understand what you have to do. With monarchs, however, there
are many potential “batterers,” few of whom actually mean to hurt the butterflies. The loggers in Mexico may be thinking only of the money that a truckload of oyamel fir trees will get them, the corn it will buy or the heat it will furnish; monarchs may never enter into the calculation. But the loss of the trees puts them in jeopardy. The farmers in the midwestern United States who plant genetically altered corn may be thinking only about increased crop yields, not how far the pollen travels or whether monarch caterpillars will ingest it and die. The road crews in New York State may be thinking only about driver safety when they raze the weeds and grasses along the highway, not realizing that in so doing they are eliminating a major food source and breeding ground for migrating monarchs.

And if culpability is difficult to assign, changing these practices may be even harder. How easy it is to feel insignificant when you’re part of something so much bigger than yourself, to just go on about your business as if your particular actions had no consequences, or even as if your particular aggregate actions had no obvious consequences—if you’re a farmer in Iowa, say, or a tree cutter in Michoacán, and you know that even if you personally don’t do that thing that is destructive to monarchs or to monarch habitat or to monarch larvae, someone else, somewhere else, might. And then who will know whose fault it is that the web is coming undone?

M
ILES FROM
the capital we lost track of the monarchs again. We were near Acambaro and saw none, and continued to see none as we at last gave up the back roads for the highway and began to approach the outskirts of Morelia, a thriving,
well preserved colonial city. No butterflies—they were off our radar screen completely, and I was disappointed. I had read accounts of monarchs’ streaming into the overwintering sites by the thousands, so many monarchs that the sky was a ribbon of orange and black, or the orange and black were a thick curtain obscuring the sky. I had been expecting to see drama on this trip—the
Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom
kind of drama, not the
Midnight Express
drama of police checkpoints—but nature was not compliant. The city began to unfold, its sand-colored buildings and cobblestone streets, and the familiar hum of commerce, drawing us in. There were signs for cell-phone vendors and Pizza Hut and Ford trucks. We had returned to our own commercial moment, and it was one in which the questions “Where are the monarchs?” and “Will we see monarchs?” were beside the point. “Where’s the cash machine?” and “Is there valet parking?” were more like it.

But not for long. After checking into the Gran Hotel and making those inquiries, Bill and I walked over to the convention center to sign in. And there were our fellow conferees, congregating in the hall, one of them talking about how, when he was driving here from Mexico City earlier in the day, there had been so many monarchs crossing the highway that traffic had come to a standstill.

“We were in the wrong place at the wrong time,” I suggested to Bill Calvert after hearing that.

“Maybe,” he said in his enigmatic way. Which I took to mean, “Maybe not.” It was a pretty compelling image, those butterflies halting traffic, he seemed to be saying, but the story that our trip would tell, once it had been added to the trips he had taken before and planned to take in the future, would have more depth, more uncertainty, more truth to it. Our
not
having seen monarchs was as revealing, and ultimately as dramatic, as our seeing them would have been. And a week on the road in a messy truck with a laconic man who had studied philosophy before turning to bugs had me believing him.

N
OT THAT
the people milling in that hallway were easy to dismiss; their names were among the pantheon of monarch biologists and ecologists and economists. Steve Malcolm, an Englishman now settled in at Western Michigan State University, and Myron Zalucki, an Australian, had both done pioneering work on host plants. David Barkin, an American economist who lived in Mexico, was there, as were Brooks Yeager, an assistant deputy secretary at the United States Department of Interior, and Steven Wendt, the head of the Migratory Bird Department of the Canadian Wildlife Service. Later they would be joined by Lincoln Brower, perhaps the preeminent monarch biologist in the world, as well as Karen Oberhauser of the University of Minnesota and Orley “Chip” Taylor of the University of Kansas. To anyone with even a passing familiarity with D-Plex, the e-mail discussion group sponsored by Monarch Watch, a monarch butterfly tracking program run by Chip Taylor, all these names had resonance. So did those of Don Davis and Paul Cherubini, two amateur lepidopterists whose spirited and voluble contributions to D-Plex had gained them a certain notoriety, and who had made the trip to Morelia from Toronto and Sacramento, respectively.

Not everyone who was anyone in this world was there: Robert Michael Pyle, the author of almost every North American butterfly field guide ever written and an expert on western (United States) monarchs, was noticeably absent,
as were the aged Professor Fred Urquhart of the University of Toronto, whose original efforts had led to the August 1976
National Geographic
article that set Bill Calvert on his search for the overwintering sites, and Homero Aridjis, the celebrated Mexican poet who had grown up in Michoacán, written extensively and beautifully about the monarchs, and been greatly responsible for the 1986 presidential decree protecting certain overwintering sites from logging. But Bruce Babbitt, the United States secretary of the interior, would be flying in, as would his Mexican counterpart, Julia Carabias-Lillo, the head of the Secretariat of the Environment, Natural Resources and Fisheries. And there would be countless functionaries from both governments, and from Canada’s as well, and representatives of NAFTA, the trade organization that had, perhaps unwittingly, chosen the monarch butterfly as its symbol. In many ways it was a more apt symbol than anyone might have first imagined: an insect that made its way from Canada to the United States to Mexico and back again demanded, in real terms, the kind of cooperative nurturing whose benefits would really accrue only beyond the realm of commerce.

“F
ACE IT,”
one of the biologists said to me later that night, when a bunch of us went out for dinner. “The idea that a monarch butterfly is going to get these countries to act in a less than self-interested way is a completely naive point of view. This whole thing is about money. A lot of it is going to get thrown around here.” I took his point and kept my eyes open, and what was interesting, I soon saw, was how the basic truth of ecology—that everything is connected—was being
leveraged by government types and representatives of NGOs and even some of the scientists to promote economic change in Mexico. So if by day two it seemed strange to ride the elevators of Morelia’s Gran Hotel and hear endless conversations about isotope fingerprinting and nectar densities, it was even more disconcerting to observe a tiny insect’s moving grown men and women to attempt, even on a modest scale, human social engineering. Or at least to talk about it.