Monarch Butterflies

Annual migration brightens lives and vistas in a mountain mining village

09/03/99

By Stephen Trimble / Universal Press Syndicate

ANGANGUEO, Mexico - Ecotourists expect an encounter with wildness. But, just as often, they find themselves immersed in the rhythms of village life. In the monarch butterfly sanctuaries of central Mexico, the natural history story is linked in every way to the fortunes of the local people. The traveler's visit becomes as much a cultural as a wilderness adventure. Mexican economist David Barkin counsels us to remember two equally important miracles: "One is that the butterflies have survived, and the other is that the campesinos (country people) have survived."

The flashy monarch - nominated as the U.S. national insect - has been called the Elvis of the insect world. You've seen this butterfly in Massachusetts meadows, along Mississippi River levees, on Iowa farms - ruffles and flourishes of tropical orange and midnight black with a 4-inch wingspan.

But in winter, the monarchs disappear from the Eastern United States. They fly south, deep into Mexico, to mountain forests between the states of Mexico and Michoacan, where they may number 4 million per acre. Butterflies cloak fir trunks and hang on boughs in clusters of tens of thousands. Up to 250 million monarchs winter here. With folded wings, dusky surface out, the butterflies look almost drab. When they flex to soak up the sun, they flash their orange and black inner surfaces, and trim the firs with jewels.

A cloud passes in front of the sun, and monarchs cascade from trees in "cloud bombs," waterfalls of saffron and sable, much like autumn leaves wafting from a New England maple. The usually quiet and stately grove fills with massed flight, a swirl of life, a whispering rain of sound. Monarchs dance past, for the most part avoiding human contact, but sometimes bestowing a kiss of wings or tiny feet, bumping against shoulders, perching on breast pockets.

After decades of searching by scientists, Cathy and Ken Brugger "discovered" these Mexican monarch winter colonies on Jan. 2, 1975. The area's residents, of course, always knew about the monarchs; they just didn't know where they summered or that the rest of the world didn't know where they wintered. The butterflies arrive in Mexico about the first of November - Dia de los Muertos, or the Day of the Dead. Indian people believe they are the returning spirits of dead children or the souls of lost warriors. The spring monarch departure signals planting time.

We came to these mountains in early March with a trip organized by The Monarch Program - a California research organization. Dr. Robert Michael Pyle (a.k.a. "Butterfly Bob") came with us as trip naturalist.

Dr. Pyle was our teacher and raconteur, and, outside the refuges, our butterfly catcher. Founder of the international invertebrate conservation group The Xerces Society, he spent one recent autumn tracking monarchs from British Columbia to Arizona. Most Western monarchs winter on the California coast, but Dr. Pyle watched some cross the Mexican border, a story he tells in his new book, Chasing Monarchs: Migrating With the Butterflies of Passage (Houghton-Mifflin, $24).

Dr. Pyle is a robust man with a tender heart and an uncanny resemblance to the late musician Jerry Garcia. He releases any butterfly caught for observation by perching it on a companion's nose, orchestrating a tickle of intimacy - a moment of farewell - before the butterfly takes wing.

Walking in the refuges, a powdery cloud of dust rises with each footfall as tourists churn volcanic soil. Monarchs too dusty to fly straggle along the trails. Dr. Pyle uses up his drinking water washing dust from their wings and gently setting them to dry in bushes along the path. "It's a purely sentimental act, but it makes me feel better," he says.

Our group of 12 traveled for a week, based in the colonial city and lakeside resort of Valle de Bravo and the mountain mining village of Angangueo. The countryside is classic Mexico, filled with rickety corn cribs and campesinos who look as if they stepped out of 1920s snapshots. Old men wearing cowboy hats and serapes. Kids leading tiny horses and burros stacked with kindling, sugar cane, grass, wooden plows. A man pushing a wheelbarrow and carrying his toddler daughter, who is wearing a frilly pink dress.

Between butterfly refuges, we stopped at trout farms and Tarascan pyramids, at markets with the familiar incongruities of perfect melons and heaps of red chiles next to plastic tubs, soccer balls and pirated music cassettes. The market "food courts" steamed with huge earthenware bowls (a local specialty) filled with stews and menudos.

We found our way to Senora Vicente's bakery, hidden behind a courtyard in Jungapeo. The baker used a huge wooden paddle to remove sweet and yeast breads of a dozen shapes from a wood-fired oven. An armload of loaves for our picnic lunch cost less than a dollar.

But it was the monarchs that brought us. Their life cycle spans three nations. The journey north begins in late March, with monarchs leaving the Mexican state of Michoacan, looking for milkweed, the only plant on which their caterpillars feed. After they mate, females live only a few weeks. It takes three or four generations to reach the Great Lakes, New England and Canada.

As days shorten, the autumn monarch generation lays on extra fat, postpones mating and lives up to 12 times longer than the summer adults. The butterflies gather in Texas and along the Gulf Coast, funneling into an invisible highway through the skies, heading south in waves to a place that their great-great-great grandparents left six months ago.

Scientists believe that only here - in the boughs of firs at 10,000 feet, a four-hour drive west of Mexico City (and on the foggy California coast) - can butterflies find the "delicate envelope" of climate they need to survive the winter. Angangueo, in a narrow valley, with cobblestone lanes winding up to the town square and its twin cathedrals, is the unofficial capital of Mexican monarch country. Farm-terraced ridges rise steeply on each side to fir forests sheltering the butterfly reserves. Mariposas monarcas, monarch butterflies, turn up here on T-shirts, house number plates and tavern signs, and as butterfly-shaped empanadas in a hotel restaurant.

At El Rosario Sanctuary, butterflies carpet the ground when they come to the forest floor to drink. Tourists must step gingerly to avoid crushing them. A sign reminds us: "Cuida a la mariposa! No la maltrates." (Be careful with the butterflies! Don't mistreat them.)

A second sign warns "Guarda Silencio." (Guard the silence.) These are holy groves. Heavily visited El Rosario was the first sanctuary to allow tourists. A popular excursion from Mexico City, up to 20,000 people come here on holiday weekends. Sierra Chincua Reserve opened in 1996, and already sees 33,000 people a year.

The Mexican federal government distributed this land to rural people, mostly Indian, in the first half of the 20th century as ejidos, communal agricultural cooperatives. That same government declared mountains where monarchs winter to be untouchable sanctuaries of worldwide importance in 1986. Logging by ejido members (ejiditarios) was banned without compensation. The ejiditarios were angry. They felt that prohibiting logging and inviting 200,000 tourists to invade their homes destroyed their economy.

And yet the people of the ejidos control the monarch's destiny. Gradually, they are becoming convinced that this is a good thing. They work as guides and horse packers, security and parking guards, ticket sellers, and craft and food vendors.

The monarchs come to the most endangered forest in Mexico. Ejiditarios continue to poach marketable wood from the sanctuaries in order to feed their families, fraying the protective shelter of the groves so much that scientists have designated the monarch migration a "threatened phenomenon." For two years, monarch numbers have plummeted. But the research baseline is barely 20 years old, so we know little of population cycles or long-term effects of tourism.

The more money locals make from tourism, the better for the monarchs, but to cook food for tourists, they need firewood - accelerating deforestation and threatening butterflies. Entrance fees are less than $2; wages are low. Conservation funding ebbs and flows with changing Mexican politics. The issues couldn't be more complicated.

Isaias Garcia's garden is one model for the future. The 32-year-old El Rosario ejiditario created a monarch watering site at a spring on his farm. Every refuge visitor passes by his gate, paying 1 peso to enter. Isaias Garcia earns money for his family, the butterflies have a perfect water source, and tourists have an extra chance to revel in the magic of monarchs. Everyone wins.

Carmelo Martinez, treasurer for the ejido that manages Sierra Chincua Reserve, told me that 80 families among the 1,500 ejiditarios benefit from tourists in some way. But the butterflies (and tourists) come for just five months. For the other seven months, people must look elsewhere for income, many working construction jobs in Mexico City. Nearby Angangueo becomes a ghost town.

To prevent the sanctuaries from becoming ghost forests - permanently - locals and scientists now attend the same monarch conferences. Together, they limit access, train guides/guards (vigilantes), plant young firs and encourage ejido businesses to do no harm to what Dr. Pyle calls the "knife-edge ecology" of the monarchs.

And so, at Chincua, a log across our path shielded the core of the grove from heavy visitation. Our ejiditario guide, Alberto, talked to his fellow vigilantes, citing our resident butterfly scientist Dr. Pyle and our connections to The Monarch Project. As a scientific group, we passed around the barrier and into the heart of the winter colony, leaving behind a group of lively schoolchildren and feeling sheepish, but thrilled.

For the next hour, we rejoiced in the ballet of the monarchs. To stand inside this kaleidoscope of millions of flashing monarch wings is a privilege, an enchantment. Dr. Pyle taught us to unfocus our binoculars to create "flying doubloons," a moving pointillist fantasia against the blue of sky or green of firs. And then we looked down to the perfection of a single monarch nectaring at brilliant blossoms of yellow senecio or scarlet salvia. Long before we'd had enough, Alberto started us back up the trail.

When we left Valle de Bravo on the last day, headed for the Mexico City airport, we thought we were done with the monarchs. But as we climbed onto the forested slopes of Nevado de Toluca, a river of butterflies poured across the road. Our driver, Salvador, assured us that this happens every sunny afternoon when the monarch colony at the small Los Saucos sanctuary flies down-canyon to water. But it was easy to imagine that the butterflies were leaving, beginning their long journey north.

The monarchs seemed especially mysterious as they coursed from the wall of forest into the clearing of roadway, a miraculous surprise. They seemed particularly fragile, their half-gram flying machinery weighed against groaning engines and the bulk of trucks. Their directional flying flaunted their gift for adaptation, their stunning migratory accomplishment.

I walked along the road in the stream of butterflies and immersed myself in pure emotional response to their flight, imagining a sentience, a purposefulness, a tenacity, a bravery.

They grace three countries, but their Spanish name best captures their beauty. I reached out to wish them well as they began their quest northward and found myself talking to them, repeating that lovely word, mariposas.

"Buen viaje, mariposas," good travels. Fly well. Come back safely. Complete your half of this miracle, and somehow we humans will learn enough to accomplish ours.

Stephen Trimble is a writer, photographer and naturalist.