Four Wings and a Prayer Part 2

And it wasn't just b.u.t.terflies, the poet said later, when we were resting at Llano de la Mula, a slightly canted alpine meadow ringed by tall oyamel trees. This place used to be full of coyotes, skunks, and rabbits. Armadillo, too. All we were seeing now was ladybugs-thousands of them, crawling and flying in great cl.u.s.ters. Wrong bioma.s.s: no one was interested. Homero got up and walked around, back into the forest, looking for the cl.u.s.ters of b.u.t.terflies he'd been expecting to find. No b.u.t.terflies, but evidence everywhere of the fires that had devastated this forest fifteen years before, fires started by people attempting to clear land for agriculture, fires that had happened to get out of control. Since then the local monarch population had been smaller and less reliable, Homero said; it was perhaps a direct result of the fires, as well as of logging.

"I feel very frustrated," he admitted, mounting his horse for the ride down. "Every time I come, there are fewer and fewer trees."

"It is very depressing for Homero to see what has happened year after year," Betty added. In his work she often served as his translator, but this was beyond words.

THE TRIP DOWN the mountain was no less treacherous than the trip up. The horses slipped. The trail kept crumbling away till there was no trail, just dust and rocks. Homero had gone on ahead; Brower was walking and pointing out trees that had gashes in their trunks the size and shape of ax blades. There were many: it was nearly epidemic.

"These flesh wounds will invite disease," Brower explained, "and eventually the trees will die." When they do, they may be hauled out legally, for though it is illegal to take down living trees in this forest because it is protected by the 1986 presidential decree, there is no such injunction against moving dead or diseased timber.

Later, at about five thousand feet, we heard the sound of a chain saw, distant but distinct. A whine, a pause, a whine again. Wood cracked and a tree crashed through the understory. Half an hour farther down the mountain and there was the tree, cut in thirds and tied to the flanks of five donkeys. The donkeys were being led by two men and a boy. "How much will you get for these?" Homero Aridjis asked them.

"Fifteen pesos per donkey," they said. Two dollars.

Chapter 4.

IT WAS DRY UP on Cerro Altamirano, but it was dry in Contepec, too-so much so that the authorities declared a water emergency. Showers were forbidden. Flus.h.i.+ng the toilet was not looked upon kindly. There were times of the day when tap water was not available at all. There were fires-small ones, but even so, their smoke signaled what lay ahead if the drought did not end. The forests at the edge of town had become tinder, and everyone feared they would ignite. The overwintering sites were at risk, like everything else, but the drought could not be blamed on illegal logging practices there, or on the presidential decree, or on the b.u.t.terflies themselves. This was an endemic problem, a national problem, having to do with changes to the land, and with population growth, and with the vagaries of weather. So even as the land parched at ten thousand feet and the water-shed diminished, Lincoln Brower's hypothesis, that the b.u.t.terflies were leaving the overwintering colonies early because they lacked water, remained unprovable.

This was of no consolation to Homero Aridjis, who rode back to town brooding. And neither was this: the absence of monarch b.u.t.terflies at one of their traditional wintering grounds was not meaningful. No one could say that the b.u.t.terflies weren't somewhere else on Cerro Altamirano; they often changed locales from year to year. Llano de la Mula might not be the St. Tropez, the Aspen, of 1997. And no one could say that monarchs were on the mountain at all. Some years particular overwintering grounds were just not used, and this might be one of those years. But this, too, was of no consolation to Aridjis, who knew that the forests of his boyhood were changing, had changed.

ELSEWHERE THERE WERE reports of heavy concentrations of monarch b.u.t.terflies, of air viscous with Danaus plexippus, places where you could not breathe with your mouth open. Sierra Chincua, near Angangueo, was one of these.

"How many?" I asked Bill Calvert, who brought me there after the conference in Morelia. We were standing on a rock outcrop watching b.u.t.terflies stream past like sp.a.w.ning salmon. To me their numbers were incalculable, like snow-flakes in a blizzard.

Calvert didn't hesitate. "Fifteen million," he said.

This was our last day together. Bill had dragged his groaning, bucking truck up the steep and rutted jeep trail and stashed it in the woods. We didn't have the necessary permits to be anything more than tourists, but out came the scale and the ruler and the logbook anyway. The b.u.t.terflies were here, and Bill Calvert was eager to know how they had fared after thousands of miles of wind and predators and rain and pesticides and spotty food supplies.

Calvert knew this place. He had spent the better part of fourteen winters camped in these woods, often living by himself in a tent, carrying out his field studies. No one had spent more time here, and even as he walked us farther off the trail, I knew he knew exactly where we were, as if the dense underbrush were macadam marked clearly with a street sign. We turned left, then right, then went straight, losing vertical feet. We were going someplace, though it all looked alike. There were monarchs overhead, clinging to the oyamel trees, and monarchs on the ground, dead. Then the trees gave way to sky and we were standing on bare rock and the sky was a river of orange and black and it was fine that we could not open our mouths because there was nothing, really, to say. After a while we moved off the rock and back through the woods to a clearing and set up shop. Bill snagged about fifty b.u.t.terflies; I found a clean piece of paper and made a matrix for recording the information. We got back to work, only vaguely conscious of the foot traffic nearby. Sierra Chincua had only recently been opened to the public and was popular with American visitors. We had seen an Audubon tour group earlier in the day.

I looked up. A woman with a pair of Leica binoculars was standing over us, watching intently as Bill Calvert stuffed a b.u.t.terfly into a gla.s.sine envelope the size of a book of stamps, to be weighed and released.

"Aren't you hurting them?" she asked indignantly.

I was about to explain that the envelope protected the insects from themselves, keeping them from flapping wildly and using up precious energy supplies or damaging their wings, but Calvert beat me to it.

"No," he said. That was all. He looked up and smiled. I knew that sly turn of mouth. Something was up. "Isn't that a black-backed oriole?" he asked idly.

"Where?" the woman asked anxiously, looking up.

"Over there." Bill pointed. The woman put her binoculars to her eyes and walked off, calling to her friends. As soon as she was gone, we picked ourselves up and moved farther into the understory.

"You try catching this time," Bill said, handing me the net. This was like sending in a rookie pitcher at the end of a 120 game. There were so many monarchs fanning the air that some couldn't help but fly right into the net. I took a single swipe and landed three hundred b.u.t.terflies. I got the win!

"You know we could be arrested for this," Bill Calvert would say now and then as we worked. This was not worry talking, it was gleefulness-two sigmas above normal for a seventeen-year-old in gleefulness.

THE MONARCHS LOOKED GOOD. Only a few were tattered or bird-bitten, only a few were thin. Most were bright orange, with full bellies and minimal wear and tear to their wings. They had flown thousands of miles, but there was no way to tell that from looking at them. They had come through just fine.

Although we didn't say so, we were also looking for tags-tiny dots of paper the size of the circle spit out from a hole punch. They would be stuck to the underside of the hind wing. The tags had a sequence of letters and numbers on them-QS498 or NG304-and some other information as well. The tags asked people who found the b.u.t.terflies, or sighted them, to report their findings to Monarch Watch, at the University of Kansas, which had been tracking the monarch b.u.t.terfly migration since 1992 and posting the data on the Internet. We looked, but our looking was reflexive. Of the hundred thousand b.u.t.terflies that were tagged that year, fewer than two hundred were ever found, and only forty-six of them in Mexico. We were in the midst of fifteen million b.u.t.terflies. We knew the odds and looked anyway. I had tagged twenty monarch b.u.t.terflies myself, months before in northern New York, and it was these that I was looking for. I had looked in Austin, and in Ciudad Maz, and in Tula. I had looked in Morelia and in Jamauve. I would look till I left Mexico.

THE BEST TIME to tag a b.u.t.terfly is in the morning. The air is cool then, and the sun is just rising, and the b.u.t.terfly, too cold to sustain flight, is nearly paralyzed. Pick it off a tree limb or off a flower and it will seem docile, nearly tame. (It will also seem stuck there: its feet have a natural Velcro on them; it sounds like tearing when you pick it up, but it's not tearing.) You can hold the monarch in your hand, stick it to your sweater. It will not go anywhere. You can collect a bunch this way.

You will need a set of tags, a piece of paper, and a pencil. The pencil does double duty. Use it first to note the time of day, the date, your name, the place where you are, the number on the tag, the s.e.x of the b.u.t.terfly. (Males have small but prominent black dots on their hind wings-pheromone sacs-and females do not.) Think of the wing as a piece of stained gla.s.s, with the black lines as the leading. The distal cell is the largest pane, and the tag will fit neatly within its boundaries. Peel the tag off its backing and stick it there. (Don't worry if some of the monarch's orange scales come off; it will still be able to fly.) Use the pencil to reinforce the adhesive, rubbing the tag with the eraser end. Make sure it is secure. Put the monarch back on your sweater or on a nearby bush. Repeat the procedure with another b.u.t.terfly. Watch as the sun rises and warms them up. Watch as they take to the air and disappear, carrying your efforts, and your best wishes, and any dream you've ever had of winning the lottery or the trifecta or the Publishers' Clearinghouse sweepstakes skyward with them.

THE MONARCH I WAS really hoping to find had left my yard on the twenty-sixth of August. My daughter had found it near the end of July feeding on the milkweed near the basketball hoop, having deduced it was there from a pile of caterpillar scat and then carefully turning over leaf after leaf until she located it three plants over. She was thrilled. It was as if her intelligence alone had put it there: she thought it should be there, and there it was! To the extent that there was owners.h.i.+p, this caterpillar was hers. It was only about a week old when we brought it to the back porch, put it in the cage we had made from a cardboard box and an old screen, and named it Junior to distinguish it from some of the others there-Biggie, Itsy, and Bitsy among them.

I told myself I was doing this for my daughter's sake, so she could witness the metamorphosis from caterpillar to b.u.t.terfly. I could describe it to her, or show her pictures or even a video, but none was in real time. Each condensed the experience to the point where amazing and remarkable and awesome were the only words that seemed appropriate. And while it was all of those things, they all missed the nuanced, constant, incremental, and very-rarely-awesome-in-its-particulars way that that remarkable and amazing transformation was occurring. In any case, it was only partly true that it was for my daughter's sake. I wanted to see it. Metamorphosis, like resurrection, is a powerful symbol. But what was happening in the cardboard box was not symbolic at all. It was nature investing symbolism with its power.

"RAISING" MONARCHS, as many schoolchildren know, is a blessedly simple task. Supply the caterpillars with fresh milkweed and water daily and watch them grow. In three weeks an individual monarch caterpillar will increase its weight three thousand times and outgrow its skin over and over again, molting five times. When it unzips its striped cuticle for the fifth time, though, it does not acquire a new skin. Instead it seems to turn inside out altogether, and when it is done there is a pale-green chrysalis studded with five gold dots, and no sign at all of the caterpillar that was there.

On the porch we were seeing this with Junior. On August 6 she crawled to the top of the cardboard box, secreted a gluey white liquid, and anch.o.r.ed herself to it. The glue was liquid silk, spun and deposited by Junior's spinnerets. When it was made, she backed up to it and grabbed on with her a.n.a.l claspers till she was securely fastened. Then she hung there like a health nut in inversion boots, her body forming a perfect J. This step was critical. A few weeks before, Biggie had fallen to the bottom of the box after his chrysalis was made. When he emerged, full-grown, his wing was crumpled and he was unable to fly. He was the monarch that was eaten by mice in our kitchen.

That night, the night of the chrysalis, my daughter told me a story at bedtime. "This will be a little scary and a little sad," she warned me. "Once there was a little girl who woke up with spots all over her. That's the scary part. Soon she made a J and then died. That's the sad part. But she didn't really die because when she came out of her chrysalis she was a beautiful b.u.t.terfly."

THAT "DIED BUT didn't really die" part was as good a description as any of what was happening inside the acorn-shaped sh.e.l.l that Junior had made. She had gone into it a caterpillar and she would, if all went well, emerge as something completely different-a b.u.t.terfly. In between she was neither, her larval self having dissolved into a viscous genetic stew that would reconst.i.tute itself into the const.i.tuent parts of a b.u.t.terfly.

After my daughter fell asleep, I opened a book called The World of the Monarch b.u.t.terfly and copied this into my notebook: "The change of form and function affects every part of the insect's being, from its senses to the way it moves and feeds. Buds of tissue in the thorax grow and develop into wings. The larva's leaf-nibbling jaws dissolve and new adult mouth parts grow, later fitting together to make a hollow tube through which the adult b.u.t.terfly will draw nectar. The long intestine shrinks to match the new diet, and s.e.x organs appear for the first time. Long, delicate antennae develop on the insect's head, and the twelve simple eyes of the caterpillar are replaced by the two huge compound eyes of the adult. All these changes are finely co-ordinated, so none comes too soon or too late."

INSIDE HER GREEN ENVELOPE, this was happening to Junior. I didn't know this for sure, of course, since the chrysalis was opaque, but this was what was supposed to be happening, having happened countless times before. The accountability of nature offers its own path to knowledge. I might never have seen a monarch b.u.t.terfly emerge from a chrysalis, but I could a.s.sume it would. It was knowledge that I could count on, that we all do count on-the background knowledge (the sun will rise, the tides will ebb, the trees will bud) that lets us live our lives so exclusively in the foreground.

On August 25 I had the first direct evidence that the metamorphosis not only was occurring but was almost complete: Junior's chrysalis was no longer green, it was black. Then I s.h.i.+ned a light on it and saw that it wasn't black at all, it was transparent. The black I was seeing was part of a wing. I could see it, too.

Junior was reborn at 8:23 A.M. Her wings were stubby, condensed, and her abdomen was enormous. She looked like a mutant. A pair of long, articulated legs that ended in pincers grasped her recently vacated apartment. Then her abdomen started to heave, pumping fluid through her veins. Her wings opened to full size like a pocket umbrella whose b.u.t.ton had been pushed.

I brought the box outside and let it sit in the sun. Junior clung to her chrysalis and swayed in the breeze like a piece of clothing on the line. Her proboscis yoyoed in and out. At 9:25, an hour into her new life, Junior spread her wings for the first time. They were a deep, almost red, orange. And it really was a new life, at least as against how I had imagined her living it (heading south, wintering in Mexico, mating, heading north, laying eggs, dying), for when her wings were fully expanded, I saw that she was not a she at all. Junior was a male.

Two hours later, when his wings were fully hardened, I gave him his tag and held him up to the sun. I said a short prayer that was really just a wish and waited for him to take off. It's so easy to impute emotions to wild creatures, and even easier to have personal feelings for them. It was more than twenty-four hundred miles from my yard to the Neovolcanics, and I really wanted Junior to make it. He pumped his wings a few times and peered over the edge of my palm like a diver contemplating the deep end of the pool. Then, without warning, he took off. His wings flapped confidently and he moved like a finch, undulating through the air. What was I to him? I wondered. Probably a tree, I thought, as he circled around me three times before landing in the gra.s.s near the pond, then high-jumping to a low branch of a white pine. There he sat for what seemed to me, who was just sitting, too, to be a long time. I went inside. Fifteen minutes later he was out of sight. Gone.

So it was Junior I was looking for when I scanned a roost with my binoculars. Junior I was hoping to find every time I pulled a monarch from Bill Calvert's net and measured its wingspan. Junior I knew I had absolutely no chance of finding, yet continued to look for, which was, when I thought about it, the acknowledgment of, the recognition of, belief, which is its own kind of story.

"MONARCHS ARE really spiritual for some people," the Canadian monarch enthusiast Don Davis said to me one day. "I had one lady tell me she kept a dead monarch in her refrigerator because it was some sort of religious symbol." Don was the sort of fellow to whom people told things like that. And chances were, once they had, he would let everyone else know by posting it on D-Plex-short for Danaus plexippus-the ongoing Internet conversation about monarchs run by Monarch Watch. Information came in and information went out, and when it did, Don Davis was usually involved in the transaction somehow. Academic papers, popular articles, videos, meetings, companies' using monarch b.u.t.terflies in their advertising-he kept everyone abreast of all of these. Writers called him to check facts, film crews relied on him to guide them, teachers sought him out to give lectures, newspaper reporters wrote annual features about his b.u.t.terfly work, calling him Mr. Monarch. His "Odds and Ends from Don Davis" was a regular feature of the D-Plex list, a random a.s.sortment of monarch comings and goings, like the social column of a local newspaper. And that was in addition to his other messages, which sometimes numbered four in a single day. He was the scribe, the keeper of the history, the librarian of the monarch community.

Of course he was retired-how else could he devote so much time to this? A retired, white-haired, Canadian gentleman: that was how I pictured him, though all I knew for sure was that he was from Toronto. The mind plays interesting tricks, sorting the evidence and fitting it into a template. People are usually more idiosyncratic than we imagine. The retired, white-haired, elderly gentleman I had come to know over the Internet did not exist. When I finally met him, on a summer's day in Toronto, I saw that Don Davis was a small, bespectacled man in his late forties who wore his unfas.h.i.+onably stiff blue jeans unfas.h.i.+onably rolled at the bottom. For twenty-five years he had been a counselor at a Toronto home for abused and troubled children, where he sometimes spent the night. He was unmarried. He was devoted to his Children's Aid work; the monarchs were just a sideline. Still, when asked to describe who he was, he did not hesitate. "I'm an amateur field naturalist," he said.

Among people who tagged monarch b.u.t.terflies, though, Don Davis was more than that: he was a celebrity. No one had had more tags recovered in Mexico, eighteen so far. No single person had tagged as many b.u.t.terflies as Don Davis, either, an estimated twenty thousand since 1985. But as great as that number was, it was nothing, really, compared to the number of monarchs migrating over all those years-something like three billion.

So Don Davis, an una.s.suming man, was embarra.s.sed that luck had been confused with accomplishment. "Back in 1985 I thought it would be really neat to tag a b.u.t.terfly in Ontario and have it picked up in Mexico. So I did some tagging and the next year I had one picked up there," he said. That was all. He wanted it to happen, and it happened. It was a fluke that year, a fluke the year after that when two more of his tags were found, and a fluke every other time. Yet it kept happening.

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 b.u.t.terflies," he recalled. "Bird banding takes more skill, but anyone can tag a b.u.t.terfly. 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 b.u.t.terflies' 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 b.u.t.terfly, 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 b.u.t.terflies' wings?' But I continued to carry out my monarch b.u.t.terfly 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 b.u.t.terflies. In 1952 Norah put out a call in the magazine Natural History. Within a few years there were some three thousand "research a.s.sociates," 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 a.s.sociates. It gave them an ident.i.ty 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 a.s.sociates 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 acc.u.mulate and take shape. In the first volume of their Newsletter to Research a.s.sociates, 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 b.u.t.terflies 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 b.u.t.terfly 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 b.u.t.terflies 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 a.s.sociates 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 acc.u.mulating, 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 b.u.t.terflies, 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 a.s.sociate 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 b.u.t.terflies 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 b.u.t.terflies. 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 false information because he got it secondhand. Luckily, as a child my girlfriend had been in that part of Mexico where the b.u.t.terflies 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 b.u.t.terflies 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 b.u.t.terflies.

"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 b.u.t.terflies didn't always go to the same place every year. He took me up. Between us we found four or five different colonies.

"The b.u.t.terflies 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 b.u.t.terflies 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 alt.i.tude."

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 b.u.t.terfly 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 a.s.sistance." Such is the fate of "research a.s.sociates," 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 ma.s.s of b.u.t.terflies clinging to it, and had fallen to the ground. As a result, the surrounding area was covered several inches deep with thousands of monarch b.u.t.terflies that were unable to fly due to the low temperature of 34F.

"While we were examining the quivering ma.s.s of b.u.t.terflies, 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 a.s.sociates' 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 b.u.t.terfly 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 b.u.t.terfly 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 b.u.t.terflies. 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' a.s.sociates. 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 b.u.t.terflies clinging to trees on the side of a ten-thousand-foot mountain in Mexico. It was quite another to know that one of those b.u.t.terflies 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 b.u.t.terflies 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 b.u.t.terfly 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 b.u.t.terflies 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 b.u.t.terfly, 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 b.u.t.terflies 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 a.s.sociates, 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 b.u.t.terfly."

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 a.s.sociates, 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 they 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 a.s.sociates, 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 a.s.sociation, which had drawn together thousands of people who had little in common but an interest in the most common of b.u.t.terflies, 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 a.s.sociates. 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 b.u.t.terflies 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 b.u.t.terfly 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 acc.u.mulation 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 pa.s.sing 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 b.u.t.terflies' likely destination was the southern timber forests. A century later, when Fred Urquhart picked up Jim Gilbert's b.u.t.terfly, Riley was shown to be right.

Anecdotal science may not have been good science, may not have been science at all, but it yielded interesting questions, and in some instances it led to crucial answers. But when the Urquharts were getting out of the business, it seemed that a whole tradition was ending. Monarch biology was becoming the province of academics. Lincoln Brower, for one, was working on sophisticated methods of chemical ecology. And while Bill Calvert was off in the woods making field notes, he was no amateur, either. In Mexico he was known as Doctor Calvert. Even Robert Michael Pyle, the lepidopterist who, more than anyone, was able to introduce laypeople to the beauty and the natural history of b.u.t.terflies through his Audubon field guides, though unaffiliated with any university, had the distinction of a doctorate from Yale.

Enter Chip Taylor-Dr. Orley Taylor-of the University of Kansas, a man who would look like Father Christmas if Father Christmas wore crisp blue oxford s.h.i.+rts and khaki pants and snacked on bee pollen. And if his workshop were crowded with amber jars of aminoacetic acid and hexane and syringes and microscopes and caged b.u.t.terflies and "Far Side" cartoons ("Ten Reasons to become an entomologist: number three: Only about a billion species to worry about") and a window box crawling with bees, all attended by a dozen elves who looked remarkably like midwestern college kids. Taylor was professor of biology and an expert on "killer" bees. But in the summer of 1992, after nearly twenty years of bee research, he was looking to move in another direction. "I was exploring several options when Brad Williamson, a high school biology teacher from Kansas City, showed up, and we began discussing monarchs," Taylor recalled. "The Urquhart program was fading, and it didn't appear that the Urquharts would ever summarize their data-or share them. We discussed initiating a tagging program and Brad insisted we had to do it differently-develop a broader base and involve students. I was a bit skeptical, but the idea appealed to the educator in me and we initiated a tagging program with our own money and some I had set aside from an income account maintained with the endowment a.s.sociation. I didn't envision Monarch Watch when I started-or becoming a monarch researcher or expert myself." But that was what happened.

ON THE WALL of a narrow office on the seventh floor of Haworth Hall at the University of Kansas was a map of North America that looked like a rendering of long- and short-haul trucking routes. Scores of colored lines connect places like Duluth, Minnesota, and Cedar Rapids, Iowa; Olathe, Kansas, and Gun Barrel, Texas; New Orleans, Louisiana, and El Rosario, Mexico; and Orion, Illinois, and Abilene, Texas. The one line that wasn't there-not in visible ink, at least-joins Toronto, Canada, to Lawrence, Kansas: Fred Urquhart's hometown to Chip Taylor's. This poster, though formally t.i.tled "Forty Years of Monarch Recoveries," was also a map of Chip Taylor's life for nearly a decade. It showed just how much of a monarch researcher he had unwittingly become.

In the summer of 1992, though, Taylor was still basically a bee man, and a little too shy to get in touch with the Urquharts. "Their summaries were getting shorter each season," he said, "and nothing new was being generated, and no summaries of the overall data seemed imminent. In fact, when Fred and Norah stopped their program, Fred was widely quoted as saying nothing had been or could be learned from the recoveries in the U.S. The data say otherwise. Fred simply didn't have the insight, or collaborators who did, to sort the data to reveal the patterns therein." Taylor and Williamson issued press releases that appeared in newspapers from Minnesota to Texas, recruiting volunteers. They were interested less in establis.h.i.+ng that monarchs from the North ended up in Mexico than in finding the routes and the azimuths by which they got there.

Once the newspaper articles came out, the phones began to ring in Haworth Hall. Most volunteers were schoolteachers looking to use monarchs in their cla.s.srooms, but there were unaffiliated individuals as well. Monarch Watch-the name Taylor and Williamson gave to their project-took off in ways that neither man had foreseen. In its first year a few thousand b.u.t.terflies were tagged; five years later the number approached a hundred thousand. By then actual, real, crucial, and sometimes anecdotal evidence about flyways, flight and weather patterns, and endurance had been added by Taylor's amateur minions to the scientific record.

In this effort, however, unlike most scientific endeavors, the outcome was less critical than the process. Taylor was tired of teaching bright university students who could answer the questions put to them on standardized tests but had no idea how those questions had been formulated in the first place. He wanted a project that was unscripted, that would not merely engage young people but inspire them to think scientifically. "All I'm doing is trying to provide a building block," Taylor said one day as he walked through the West Campus greenhouse checking his milkweed seedlings. There were hundreds of them. "When I was thirteen I decided honeybees were very interesting and I was going to learn everything about them. I badgered my mother to take me to the library and I got out all the books on bees and read them over and over again. I've got pa.s.sion in my soul, and that's what I'm trying to inspire with Monarch Watch. Pa.s.sion. That's why I like beekeepers. They're pa.s.sionate."

Outside the greenhouse monarchs were chasing one another and nectaring on purple thistle and basking in the sun. There were pearl crescents and buckeyes and cloudless sulfurs, too, and cabbage whites and viceroys. As Taylor walked through the field, all manner of insect life buzzed around him, or lit on his s.h.i.+rt, as if he were Saint Francis of the invertebrates. He picked a honeybee off an aster and held it to my ear. I drew away, taking one large step backward. Taylor laughed and turned it over. "It's a male," he said. "No stinger." Two paces later he stopped and knelt by a small, leafy cottonwood and beckoned me over. "See that?" he said. No, I didn't. "Look at the underside of the leaf," he instructed. He turned it over and there was a nearly microscopic pearl-the egg of a viceroy b.u.t.terfly. This might have been an entomological parlor trick, but I was impressed nonetheless. "How did you know it would be there?" I asked dumbly. "Because when I was twelve I taught myself which b.u.t.terflies lay eggs on which plants," Taylor said. "Viceroys prefer small, young cottonwoods." "Oh," I said, almost walking into a trap laid by the menacing (I thought) orb weaver spider that was presiding over two dead monarchs suspended from her web, shrouded in white silk like bodies ready for burial.

The greenhouse milkweed was necessary for one of Monarch Watch's sideline-and somewhat controversial-businesses, sending larvae to schools and individuals eager to raise their own caterpillars and watch them transform themselves into b.u.t.terflies. Controversial because the larvae, which were also being raised in the West Campus greenhouse, were being s.h.i.+pped all over the country to be released into the wild population, where they posed the danger of infusing strange or nonadapted genes into a local population or causing bacterial infections. Although thousands went out the door of Haworth Hall each year, Taylor was convinced that they were not statistically significant ("Nevertheless," he urged members of Monarch Watch, "we should be cautious and under no conditions should we release diseased monarchs into the natural population"). In any case, Taylor understood that dominion, even dominion over a small insect, could be a route to pa.s.sion: maybe some of the people who raised these monarchs would care enough about their fate to learn more about the Mexican preserves or about pesticide use in the United States or about the use of transgenic crops. Maybe some of them would become field biologists themselves, or zoologists, or ecologists. Taylor saw himself as a teacher, a mentor, an inspiration. The caterpillars were essential.

"Could there be serious consequences of releasing cla.s.sroom-reared monarchs in the eastern population?" Taylor asked readers of the Monarch Watch Newsletter in 1998. Then he rephrased it another way: "What might it take to have a genetic impact on monarchs?" These were not rhetorical questions. Taylor seemed to have an endless supply of them. Did El Nio affect monarchs? Did nectaring monarchs prefer one sugar concentration to another? Did monarchs compete with other species? Were caterpillars attracted to or repelled by light?

"We have legitimate questions to answer," Chip Taylor said. "That's why I put them out there. The data from an eighth-grader have the potential to be just as good as those of a retired senior citizen. There is absolutely no reason amateurs cannot get these data. I want to show that anyone can become a scientist."

Taylor had tears in his eyes when he said this. He believed it as thoroughly as Lincoln Brower did not, and when he spoke he was like that rare political candidate who speaks with conviction, or a preacher who is full of grace. Monarchs mattered to him. Lepidoptery mattered to him. But education mattered the most.

"Science is a process of learning from your mistakes," he said. "If I get data that're dead wrong, I know I'm onto something. Failure tells you where to go next. Scientists forget how many mistakes they made along the way. They present their results in a refined way that doesn't suggest they screwed up for four years."

BECAUSE THE QUESTIONS mattered to him as much as, and maybe more than, the answers, Taylor eventually got in touch with the Urquharts. He tried to, that is, sending them articles about Monarch Watch, and annual reports, and posters, and newsletters. He never heard from them. When he requested copies of the Insect Migration a.s.sociation's reports, he was rebuffed and told they were for members only, not for public consumption. The Urquharts' collegiality, it seemed, went only so far. Taylor was disappointed. He had a hunch that all the information they had collected, once it was put together, would add up to something, though he wasn't sure what. Something about which routes the b.u.t.terflies took to Mexico. How they knew to follow those routes might come after that.

Taylor was finally able to obtain a complete set of Insect Migration a.s.sociation reports, supplied to him by a former IMA research a.s.sociate. He and his students got to work, mapping the course of every single b.u.t.terfly that had been tagged and recaptured over the thirty years of the Urquharts' project. A two-mile trip, a fifteen-mile trip, a trip of fifteen hundred miles-every one of them was plotted. It was like seeing a Polaroid develop, watching those lines accrue. When it was done it showed two distinct flyways east of the Rockies, one coastal, the other through the plains, two routes so consistent that they suggested to Taylor that "the monarch b.u.t.terfly has a general geographic sense. If it's blown off course it can reorient itself to get back to Mexico, like a bird that gets blown off course. That's a pretty interesting suggestion. This is the only insect for which we have such data."

Taylor was also intrigued by what the picture didn't show. There was a huge hole in the map east of New Orleans, north to St. Louis, east to Virginia. No monarch from that area had yet been recovered in Mexico. That was critical because Taylor "sensed" that lat.i.tude, as well as longitude, factored into the monarchs' trip to the Transvolcanics. "The tagged data don't meet up with our expectations regarding lat.i.tude," he said, pointing to the map. "The b.u.t.terflies ought to be turning right, right near that hole. The data suggest it, but they just don't support it." So Taylor was going to force the data's hand. Or rather, his a.s.sociate Dr. Sandra Perez was. Perez, a dynamic young researcher who had been a postdoc in Taylor's lab, would be flying to Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., and Dalton, Georgia, later in the year with about a hundred Kansas b.u.t.terflies on ice. After spending three days in a mesh tent to acclimatize, the monarchs would be released, and Perez would record which way they flew. Would they behave like Kansas monarchs and continue heading south, or would they behave like Taylor supposed southeastern b.u.t.terflies should behave, and head more westerly? Perez was guessing they'd go south; Taylor was betting they'd head west. A beer was riding on the outcome, but the experiment was still some months off.