Ay, caramba!” cried Luis Miguel as we lumbered on our mountain ponies through
the Mexican pine forest. “Here comes the welcoming committee!” Down the
trail towards us, swirling in a shaft of sunshine, swept thousands of
orange-and-black butterflies. If Matisse had invented the kaleidoscope, it
would have looked like this, a vortex refracting with flashes of amber.
Turning back in my saddle, I could see the faces of my friends Humberto and
Rosie wreathed in smiles. Butterflies were tumbling over their horses’
heads, eddying around their shoulders, fanning their cheeks with
imperceptible wing-beats.
The gods had blessed us. That morning, the sky had been overcast. Luis Miguel
had been worried we might be in for a “ dia triste” – a sad day. But
the clouds had cleared and now the butterflies were taking flight, using the
warmth of the sun to recharge their batteries. This was just a tiny posse,
descending from the main colony to a lower altitude in search of moisture.
Wild lupins by the path were heavy with butterflies sucking up tiny droplets
of nectar.
Ahead of us, at 12,000ft, was the butterflies’ roosting site, one of a dozen
or so nuclei in a small area of precipitous montane forest. The location was
stunning, but why the butterflies choose this precise spot in the Mexican
state of Michoacan, 130 miles north of Mexico City, as their winter
residence is one of the many mysteries that surround these tiny creatures.
The monarchs arrive here in November and leave again in March. The spectacle
is one of the most incredible phenomena in the natural world, and still one
of the most difficult to explain.
It was only in the 1970s that the world discovered the incredible seasonal
proliferation of monarch butterflies in this pocket of pine forest near
Angangueo, an old silver-mining town. It took a further decade and a
sophisticated tagging programme to discover where the colourful insects came
from. The result was almost unbelievable. Every year, 250m monarch
butterflies fly here from the Great Lakes in Canada, more than 3,000 miles
away. Why and how they do this is still unknown.
Recent research has produced more revelations. It takes the monarch
butterflies at least three generations to make the arduous journey north
from Mexico to Canada, but only one to fly back. Somehow, this fourth
generation, born in Canada, more than triples its natural life span – from
two months to about seven – in order to make it back down to Michoacan in
one go. The butterflies we were seeing now had not only discovered the
elixir of youth, they had returned to a spot that only their
great-grandparents had been to before.
As we climbed higher, the air, fragrant with resin, grew perceptibly thinner.
We dismounted in a dense stand of pine just before the brow of a ridge. A
few local boys were guarding the site. One of them led us under a boundary
rope and down the edge of a steep gully. He put a finger to his lips,
gesturing to us to keep quiet.
The spectacle that greeted us was, at first, beyond comprehension. Butterflies
coated the trees. Branches bowed beneath the combined weight of thousands. A
thick layer of hibernating butterflies insulated the tree trunks. Packed
side by side, with their wings closed, exposing the grey undersides, they
looked like some strange lichen or a carpet of mussels at low tide.
But it was the sound that was most extraordinary. One butterfly makes no
perceptible noise, but millions on the wing produce the surround sound of a
waterfall. Now and again, as the sun dipped behind a cloud, the air was
whipped by a tornado of butterflies eddying like autumn leaves as they
frantically sought shelter before the dropping temperature incapacitated
them.
“The Aztecs used to believe that the souls of dead warriors returned as
butterflies,” Luis told me softly as we gazed into clouds of insects. “They
called them the ‘eternal sun-dancers’.” Stupefied, we sat down to watch. The
vastness and minuteness of this display stretched the limits of the
imagination. Every one of these butterflies had achieved a miracle.
Fluttering along at an average speed of 7½mph, they had spanned an entire
continent, crossing prairies and motorways, negotiating mountain ranges,
lakes and cities, weathering storms and blazing deserts. For all those that
had triumphed, millions had failed – splattered on windscreens, tumbled in
the slipstream of aeroplanes and juggernauts, singed in bush fires and
barbecues, pulled apart by a cat in some back garden, or surrendered to the
cumulative effects of starvation and exhaustion.
Earlier, in his car, Luis had played us a CD by a local band from Patzcuaro.
One song, Monarca, featured a little guitar made from the shell of an
armadillo. It mimicked exactly the sound of the butterflies. “ Ay, but
that’s beautiful,” Luis had said as we listened. “If I’d heard that all
those years ago in Chicago, I think my heart would have broken.”
Luis knew about migration. He had made it as far as the Great Lakes himself.
As a young man in his twenties, desperate for work, he had braved the
journey to “ el otro lado” – the other side – following his coyote
(people-trafficker) through tunnels under the border. He knew the extremes
the butterflies would have endured as they travelled the continent. Dressed
for Texas, he had arrived in the Windy City in midwinter. He had never known
cold like it. He thought his ears would fall off. Mexico seemed a million
miles away. He had comforted himself with the thought that Lake Michigan
sounded like Michoacan; the Native Indian word for “great water” stretched
the length of the continent, connecting him with home. Two years later,
stunned by the racial prejudice that divided him from Americans, yet with
money in his pocket and a good grasp of PACIFIC English, he returned to
Mexico to start a family OCEAN and embark on a career as a tour guide.
I watched as a butterfly, barely half a gram in weight, landed on Luis’s hand.
“A male,” he said, pointing out two distinguishing black spots on the
insect’s hind wings. “He will mate with a female, giving her the boost of
energy she needs to fly back to California to lay her eggs. He sacrifices
his last reserves to do this, and so he dies here.” Tattered wings of
vanquished males lay on the ground between us like leaf litter.
I wondered how much longer the monarchs could survive in such extraordinary
numbers. It’s a question that’s been worrying conservationists for some
time. Enormous tracts of agricultural land along their flight path are
becoming mono-crop or GM “deserts”. Up and down America, pesticides and
herbicides are eradicating the monarchs’ host plant, milkweed.
And in Mexico, illegal logging is making inroads into the crucial area of
forest where the butterflies winter.
Yet something about butterflies stirs emotions. Throughout the continent, the
monarchs have been making waves. Impassioned by their plight, people in the
USA, Canada and Mexico are following the butterfly journey online and
reporting sightings; children are growing milkweed in their back yards,
creating oases, or “way stations”, along the migration route; tagging
programmes involve a complex chain of shared information. The butterflies
are a concern that crosses borders.
“One of the most important aspects of my job as a tour guide,” Luis said, “is
breaking down boundaries. The butterflies make that easy.
Americans come here with all the usual preconceptions about Mexico and
Mexicans; then they see these millions of butterflies, they know where
they’ve come from – they’ve seen them in the States – and where they’re
going.
And it dawns on them: we all live in the same continent, on the same planet.
The laws of cause and effect apply to us all.”
That, to me, seemed the most disarming miracle of all. The monarchs united the
North American continent, healed its divides. The butterfly migration
mirrored the movement of people from Michigan to Michoacan, from thousands
BC to the present day. The USA may end up building a concrete wall along its
border, but, no matter how high or how long or how wide this wall is,
butterflies will simply flutter over it, mocking the attempts of man to halt
the flow of traffic, to resist a process that has been in effect for
millenniums, connecting us all. Todos unidos. The Butterfly Effect. And if
the draught of one butterfly’s wings can, according to chaos theory, give
rise to a hurricane, then, I wondered as I watched the sky fill with orange
as the monarchs returned to their trees to roost, perhaps the flight of
millions of butterflies can transform the consciousness of a continent.
Isabella Tree travelled as a guest of Exsus Travel. Her book Sliced Iguana:
Travels in Mexico is published by IB Tauris at £10.99
Travel details: Exsus Travel (020 7292 5050, www.exsus.com)
has a 12-day trip, taking in the butterfly migration, from £3,495pp, with a
stay at Rancho San Cayetano (00 52-715 153 1926,
www.ranchosancayetano.com), plus three nights at the hip Condesa DF (555
241 2600, www.condesadf.com) in
Mexico City, two nights at Villa Montaña (443 314 0231, www.villamontana.com.mx)
in the beautiful colonial city of Morelia, and five nights on a stunning
Pacific beach at Tides Zihuatanejo (755 555 5500, www.tideszihuatanejo.com).
The price includes British Airways flights from Heathrow to Mexico City and
domestic flights with Mexicana. Or try Naturetrek (01962 733051, www.naturetrek.co.uk)
or Last Frontiers (01296 653000, www.lastfrontiers.com).
When and where to go: the monarchs start arriving in the butterfly
reserve – the Santuario Mariposa Monarca – in early November and they leave
in early March. They congregate at epicentres in the forest, the most
popular of which is El Rosario, seven miles up a gravel road from the small
village of Ocampo and a 45-minute drive from Angangueo. El Rosario is the
most commercial of the sites, and has been most affected by illegal logging.
Sierra Chincua, five miles beyond Angangueo, is an epicentre with a
relatively easy hike. Cerro Pelon is the newest sanctuary open to the
public, and – for now – the least damaged. The terrain is not, however, as
open as El Rosario, so you see only a small portion of the epicentre.
Getting there involves a long, steep climb, and horses are recommended.
Expect to pay about £5 for a guide and £5 for a horse, as well as fees for
entering the reserve and for parking your car. This is money well spent, as
it gives locals much-needed income and a vested interest in protecting the
reserve. Opposite the church in the village of Donato Guerra, at the base of
Cerro Pelon, is a simple restaurant serving wonderful mole negro, fresh
trout and tortillas.
Guide: Luis Miguel Lopez Alanis (www.mmg.
com.mx; e-mail: myguide@mmg.com.mx
or mexmich@prodigy.net.mx; 00 52
443 340 4632) is an English-speaking guide with years of expertise in
monarch butterflies.
Excellent in all respects bar one. GM crops do NOT harm monarch butterflies! Please see the scientific literature such as this from the early 2000s. http://www.scidev.net/editorials/index.cfm?fuseaction=readeditorials&itemid=12&language=1
Tony Combes, London, UK