Four Wings and a Prayer Part 3

"This whole monarch thing is so weird," Perez said one afternoon in Lawrence, having driven in from Tucson, where she was completing a second postdoc (on ants), to consult with Taylor, with whom she continued to collaborate on monarchs. "No one ever asks me about my dissertation, ever. Do you want to know the t.i.tle? It's 'The Risk-Sensitive Foraging Behavior of Carpenter Bees.' So then I work in this lab for a few months and boom, everyone is interested in what I'm doing. You just say the words monarch b.u.t.terfly, and people are interested."

Perez, though, was being modest. She said the words monarch b.u.t.terfly and people listened because she happened to say them to the three million listeners of National Public Radio. It was May 1997, and she was standing in a field in Kansas, releasing b.u.t.terflies and then running after them with a compa.s.s as the reporter ran after her with a microphone. Perez was conducting a clock-s.h.i.+fting experiment. Under Chip Taylor's guidance, she had collected a number of migrating monarchs and kept them in the lab for nearly two weeks, changing the light and dark cycles to confuse them into believing they were in a different time zone-Hawaii's, by my calculation. Perez had two control groups as well. One was kept in the lab without being clock-s.h.i.+fted; the other consisted of migrants captured in the wild and kept outdoors.

The question Perez and Taylor were asking was quite simple: Do migrating monarch b.u.t.terflies use the sun to guide them to their winter homes? To find out, Perez released the b.u.t.terflies one at a time and ran after them till they were out of sight, recording the way they were headed. The heading-the direction in which the monarch's body was pointing, even if it was being buffeted sideways or backward by the wind-was key, since routine vanis.h.i.+ng bearings had proved deceptive. Captive monarchs, especially those with low body temperatures, were notoriously weak fliers. They tried to go a certain way but were not powerful enough to succeed.

"When you take vanis.h.i.+ng bearings, you get false information," Perez said. "It can't accommodate the wind. Basically you're getting wind direction. The body orientation and the vanis.h.i.+ng bearings were markedly different, so I started to record the body orientation-the heading-as well, and when I did, some patterns started to show up. The vanis.h.i.+ng bearings of the animals in the wild were what we expected, but the vanis.h.i.+ng bearings of the b.u.t.terflies we had cooled down in storage were all over the place. But their headings were all the same. Once I realized this, I started to do orientation studies looking at headings, not at vanis.h.i.+ng bearings."

Once Perez began to do this, the results were pretty stunning. It was midafternoon on a sunny day in an open field on the Lawrence campus. She released the control monarchs. They flew in the predicted south-southwesterly direction, the direction of the Mexican overwintering sites. So far, so good. Then she began releasing the clock-s.h.i.+fted b.u.t.terflies, and one by one they began to head west-northwest. They behaved, in other words, as if it were nine in the morning. To Taylor's question "Do monarch b.u.t.terflies use the sun to orient themselves?" Perez's data seemed to chorus a resounding "Yes!"

"The week the sun-compa.s.s story aired on NPR, a guy I didn't know showed up in my lab in Tucson wearing a suit and tie," Perez said. "He said he was working on some kind of nanoplane for some agency in Was.h.i.+ngton and he thought this biological information might be applicable. I guess he thought the sun compa.s.s was the tip of the iceberg, but in fact as far as I was concerned it was the whole iceberg.

"A lot of people didn't believe we were getting these results, because they weren't able to get them. They said it was impossible. But I didn't know it was impossible, so I did it."

Adrian Wenner was one of these. A professor emeritus of natural history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Wenner was unconvinced by Sandra Perez's results. To anyone familiar with the monarch world, this was not surprising. Wenner was a professional naysayer, a gadfly and critic, the one person least likely to be impressed by anyone's data. This negativity wasn't personal, and it wasn't spurious. Wenner was a thoughtful, courteous man-and he was smart, endowed with the kind of searing intelligence that one hopes not to cross. Wenner took one look at the clock-s.h.i.+fting experiment and began to tick off its flaws. At first he said nothing, though it disturbed him to see the experiment written up in Nature, which he had thought had more exacting standards. But when the Los Angeles Times picked up the story, that was too close. Wenner began openly to debunk the experiment, arguing that it was not statistically significant, that the statistical a.n.a.lysis was flawed, and that the whole enterprise was biased because Perez "knew" in which direction migrating monarchs were "supposed" to move, knowledge that might have influenced her outcomes.

"It seems to me that we keep 'getting the cart in front of the horse,' " Wenner wrote to Chip Taylor shortly after the L.A. Times piece ran, "letting theory rather than evidence drive interpretation." Wenner also took the data and put them through other statistical a.n.a.lyses and came up with nothing: these tests did not show the data to be statistically significant. In other words, if these tests had been subst.i.tuted for the one Perez had used, the conclusion would have been contrary to hers. This was another complaint of Wenner's: if data were a.n.a.lyzed in three different ways and only one of those tests indicated significance, the scientist was free to discard the results of the two "failed" tests. Anything that did not support the narrative could be ignored.

"Striving to find out what animals really do in nature is a far more n.o.ble pursuit than trying to 'prove' that they do what we might wish them to do," Adrian Wenner wrote in a memo dated September 25, 1997, and addressed to "Those Interested in Monarch b.u.t.terfly Biology." Although nominally commenting on the sun-compa.s.s experiment, Wenner was registering a much larger complaint. He did not accept the conventional wisdom; he did not believe that monarch b.u.t.terflies migrated. He knew that the eastern population moved southward in the fall. He knew that much of the western population moved toward the coast at around the same time. But he refused to accept that in either case the movement was intentional. Intent, he believed, was a human attribute. So was wanting the story of the monarch b.u.t.terfly to be more dramatic than it really was.

Wenner's own explanation of the southward movement of eastern monarchs each fall went like this: "In the fall, monarch adults in Canada and the upper Midwest likely receive some environmental trigger (change in photoperiod or seasonal cold snap) and cease egg laying. When the main jet stream moves south out of Canada, high and low pressure cells become carried across extreme southern Canada and later across the U.S. At that time, monarchs need merely rise on thermals during clearing conditions and become carried toward the south out of the region in which they were reared. If they have reached sufficient alt.i.tude in their ride on thermals, the north winds can carry some of them considerable distances toward Mexico." The reason they all seemed to end up in the same place in Mexico, Wenner argued, was simple: Monarchs were found in the overwintering sites because that was where people expected to find them. In other words, they might be in other places as well, but the world was big, and who was looking?

D-PLEX, where this discussion and the one about the sun compa.s.s and those about the effect of logging on the Mexican habitat and anything else concerning monarchs took place, was another of Chip Taylor's inventions. There were eighteen messages posted in December 1995, the first month the site was in business. Less than four years later, in September 1999, there were eight hundred. There seemed to be no end to the controversies, the information, and the queries. Chip Taylor stayed in the background as much as possible, letting other personalities dominate, but then he would appear, fielding questions, noting unusual recoveries of tagged b.u.t.terflies (in Cuba, Ireland, the Bahamas), and refereeing the fights that swept through the group now and then like the flu. ("Here's a cla.s.sic example of a double standard in the b.u.t.terfly community," a professional b.u.t.terfly breeder named Rick Mikula wrote in October 1997: "b.u.t.terflies transported from Michigan to Texas, which everyone will think is cute because children were involved. However, were these b.u.t.terflies infected with anything? Who knows? But when a professional b.u.t.terfly breeder rears b.u.t.terflies under laboratory conditions, eliminating any sick stock, [he's a] bad [person]. Under the current double standard no one turns their head when a nine-year-old releases what could be the most infected monarch at the roosting site, but [everyone] screams when someone takes their time and does it right." Soon afterward Lincoln Brower weighed in, directing his reply to Chip Taylor but posting it for all to see: "Rick Mikula's e-mail message on the interchanges of monarchs borders on a lack of civility and does not advance intelligent discourse on what is a legitimate debate about the wisdom (or lack thereof) in making artificial transfers of monarch b.u.t.terflies between different geographic areas in North America." "I truly hope you did not find my response as uncivil as Dr. Brower did," Mikula wrote back. "I did not mean it to be.... The question I posed still puzzles me. I am all for kids' releasing b.u.t.terflies, but it seems the professionals always get a bad rap. But I must say after that blasting from Dr. Brower it will certainly be the last time I respond to a posting on the list." It wasn't.) The migration-if that was what it was-was tracked in a haphazard but engaging way, with people all over the country reporting when they had seen their first spring monarch, or when the fall monarchs were pa.s.sing through, and in what numbers. There was an exclamatory feeling, pa.s.sed like a torch from writer to writer as the monarchs moved north, or west, or south: First Texas Sighting! First Monarch to Reach Canada! Monarchs Cl.u.s.tering in Pacific Grove! Monarchs Leave El Rosario! And n.o.body seemed to tire of it, not even Adrian Wenner, tending his garden in Santa Barbara. "I continue to maintain that we actually know little about the remarkable migration phenomenon," he wrote in September 1997, in a message that challenged, yet again, the sun-compa.s.s theory. "In the meantime, all stages of monarch caterpillars continue to ravage the milkweed plants in our yard and the females continue to oviposit."

Aberrations were noted, too, as when someone observed a monarch b.u.t.terfly mating with a queen b.u.t.terfly. Or when, in mid-November 1997, Don Davis wrote that he had "received a report from a relative today that in the northwest end of metropolitan Toronto ... he observed a monarch, with wings opened, sunning on the south side of his garage. I might be a bit skeptical of this report, except that I know this gentleman well and I know that he knows what a monarch looks like."

"Thanks to all the taggers," Chip Taylor addressed the group two days later. "Your efforts have once again produced some interesting data. And thanks to all those who have been so gracious as to track us down or send us the information on the tagged b.u.t.terflies they encountered.... Some interesting patterns have emerged. One of these patterns has to do with the relations.h.i.+p between direction and distance. Nearly all long distance flights are south or southwest, but shorter flights show greater variation in direction."

LATE FALL AND early winter were always a quiet time on D-Plex. It was as if the partic.i.p.ants, like the b.u.t.terflies, were in a state of creative diapause, conserving their thoughts and attention for the remigration a few months off. The excitement of being part of the long-distance relay race as the monarchs swept south from Canada to Mexico was, for the time being, over. In October 1997 there were some three hundred messages on D-Plex. The next month there were only about a hundred. It was the same in December. Don Davis offered his "Odds and Ends" a few times, and there was the usual chatter: discussions about monarchs in Florida and tips on buying milkweed at Home Depot and a message from someone in Warsaw alerting everyone to a movie on monarchs that would be airing on Polish TV.

From Mexico, however, almost nothing was heard, and almost no one was writing about what was going on there, either. It was as if the b.u.t.terflies, having reached their winter home, were now safely in their beds, asleep, and not to be disturbed. But that, of course, was not at all what was happening. Although their metabolisms had slowed, and though their reproductive systems were temporarily shut off, the monarchs were not hibernating. They spent a surprising amount of time in the air, playing what looked like a child's game: sunbathing in the trees until a cloud drew a curtain on that warmth, then rus.h.i.+ng madly skyward, flapping. The sound of their wings was startling then, like spontaneous clapping. It erupted, and arced, and fell away. Most of the time, though, the monarchs were huddled on tree trunks and branches, one upon the next until the bark was no longer visible. They were waiting: waiting for the days to lengthen, for the temperature to rise, for their biological clocks to start ticking loudly again.

NEAR THE END of December a cold front moved through Mexico, and there was some concern voiced on D-Plex that the b.u.t.terflies might have been affected. Since so many monarchs were cl.u.s.tered in such a small place, cold weather posed a danger, not only to individual monarchs but to the population at large. Chip Taylor posted a calming message three days before Christmas. Yes, it had been cold, he said, but not to worry: the monarchs were fine. "Mortality can be severe however when snowfall is followed by cold rain and then freezing conditions," he wrote. "Long periods (a week or more) of cold, rainy weather appear to have the strongest impacts on the monarchs. The monarchs can't move under these conditions and many become 'waterlogged' (wetted) and fall to the ground where they usually die (or are eaten by mice). I don't have all the literature available but the most severe mortality attributable to a particular weather event I was able to find occurred in 1981 (and not '83, the time of the last major El Nio). Even though the mortality was extreme, 80 percent of the b.u.t.terflies survived this event. Perhaps Bill Calvert could provide more information on this and other causes of extreme mortality at the roost areas."

Two weeks later he did. Calvert was back in Mexico, at the Chincua and El Rosario sanctuaries, and the news was less rea.s.suring. "It rained hard on Sat.u.r.day, January 18th," he reported. "Tuesday was partly cloudy and cold. Wednesday not a cloud was in the sky and the b.u.t.terflies did perform! The Rosario colony was quite high, still above the Llano de los Canejos. That's about equivalent to the top of the loop, the same level as the very top of the trail system, but over to the left about 200 yards. It's a kilometer-and-a-half walk to the colony. At this colony we found evidence of many b.u.t.terflies knocked down from their cl.u.s.ters by the weekend storm. To get to the colony at Chincua you walk about three-quarters of a kilometer down from the Mojonera Alta where we found evidence of moderate to heavy mortality due to the mid-December storm. The colony that was in position near the Mojonera Alta had moved. Only a few weakened b.u.t.terflies were evident among piles of dead ones."

Soon after Bill Calvert wrote this, Chip Taylor and Sandra Perez made the trip to El Rosario themselves. "One observer told me he had seen piles of dead monarchs up to two feet deep near the top of the ridge at Chincua," Taylor wrote, noting that the local guides there were reporting that the numbers of monarchs appeared to be down from the year before. Taylor, however, was unconvinced. Population size was always difficult to a.s.sess, he said, especially when b.u.t.terflies were spread across a large area, as they were that winter. He was sanguine. The monarchs looked good, winter was nearly over, five tagged b.u.t.terflies had been found already, and he had seen a mating pair overhead, a sure sign of spring and of the remigration to come.

A few days later it seemed that this "all clear" might have been premature. David Marriott, who ran the Monarch Project, a California-based monarch education program, was also in Angangueo, helping a film crew make an IMAX doc.u.mentary on the b.u.t.terflies, and he called Chip Taylor in Lawrence; Taylor relayed his observations to D-Plex: "The overnight lows at the top of the mountain appear to be lower than normal due to the lack of overcast on most nights. Patches of ice and frost are common each morning. Some of the monarchs visiting seeps to get moisture late in the day are evidently becoming too cold to return to the trees and many appear to be dying from exposure overnight.... Local residents claim that this is the driest year in memory."

I was away when these messages were posted, and so I read them later as a group, archivally, without the distractions of watching them unfold in real time, though my mind wandered to Contepec and the horses, and how they had been unable to get any purchase because the ground was so dry. It seemed only natural to find a note from Betty Aridjis, Homero Aridjis's wife, in this stack of mail. A fire had broken out in the mountains we had climbed, destroying hundreds of acres of forest. "The two areas which burned were on the Contepec, Michoacn, side," Betty said, "precisely the place where monarchs had arrived in November, although they [had] quickly abandoned the mountain as there was a dearth of water in the area due to a severe summer drought, and on the Temascalcingo, Mexico, side, an area behind the Llano de la Mula." It was believed that the blaze had been started by a campfire gone out of control. "Lincoln," Betty Aridjis wrote to Lincoln Brower, though she had addressed her note to no one in particular, "remember that on our visit to the Llano de la Mula we saw the remains of several apparently recent campfires?" I remembered, too.

IT WAS MONTHS before anyone tried to put the pieces together-to make sense of the anecdotal reports, to fit them together. Even Chip Taylor in Lawrence, the man with all the pieces, was having trouble. "What happened to all those fall monarchs that were seen heading toward Mexico?" he asked in the 1997 season summary. "Did they make it? It's hard to tell.... Perhaps many of the monarchs didn't make it to Mexico or died shortly after their arrival. I visited El Rosario on 14 November.... The number of monarchs in the air and in the trees was spectacular but as a biologist I couldn't take my eyes off the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of dead and dying monarchs already scattered on the forest floor. How strange, I thought, to have the biological drive to fly all the way to Mexico only to die within days of arrival.

"In February, we saw evidence at El Rosario that monarchs caught in the open or on the ground at the end of the day had probably frozen to death. Cold mornings limited the ability of monarchs to fly to sources of water, and water became increasingly difficult to find as the winter progressed. At El Rosario, the lack of water contributed to an unusual redistribution of the monarchs late in the winter. In late February and March, a large portion of the colony moved downhill to a source of moisture and trees on the property of Angangueo, the adjacent ejido.... This appears to be the first time in memory that the colony resettled on the Angangueo side.

"The condition of the monarchs at the end of winter probably determines their ability to remigrate in the spring. Was this a more stressful winter than normal? We don't know.

"Unlike the spring of 1997, there have been no reports of large numbers of spring monarchs on the move.... What does this mean? Are we in for a normal year, a good year, or a bad year? At this point, we don't know."

OBSERVATION DOES NOT always yield a bad guy, even if the narrative demands it. No one knew if drought had caused the b.u.t.terflies to move downhill. No one knew why they appeared to be in bad shape, or why the fall migration, considered to be the "best" in twenty years, had not led to overwhelming numbers in the preserves. No one knew what had happened to all those b.u.t.terflies.

Chapter 6.

TORPID, that's the way a monarch in winter is often described, and there were times, sitting by the wood stove in my house in the mountains that January, watching the snow fall and the birds peck at the feeder, when I felt like that myself, as if a full day's work would be to stay warm and dry. The snow would come, and then it would disappear, beaten back by an icy rain that kept tugging on the power lines, often taking them down. My family left for a while, and I was on my own, being careful always to have wood in the woodbox and candles and matches and jugs of water ready for the inevitable hours when the lights would flicker and there would be darkness and chill and a quiet that would amplify the dog's breathing till it sounded like the saw of an ocean tide. There was a game my daughter and her schoolmates played called Predator and Prey, where the prey was a migrating monarch trying to avoid the long reach of its many predators. It was important, then, to "think like a monarch" in order to survive, and sometimes, stoking the fire and reading by flashlight on the couch at dusk, I would find myself thinking like I thought a monarch might "think," thinking the most elemental thoughts about water and heat, nothing more.

I called Lincoln Brower to get an update on the situation in Mexico, and he mentioned that there had been death threats made against Homero Aridjis, who now had three bodyguards and was thinking of leaving Mexico for a while. I took out a quarto of Homero's poems and read them one evening in the uneven glow of the fire. "I have no fear of death / I have died many times already," began a poem called "Fray Gaspar De Caravajal Remembers the Amazon." "Day after day / like all men I have sailed / toward nowhere / in search of El Dorado / but like them all / I have found only / the extreme glare of extreme pa.s.sion."

In those quiet, unmolested hours, I was wondering about pa.s.sion, too-about why it arose and why it went away, and how it was that a small insect, for instance, was able to give people their voice. Was lepidoptery a way of cleaving to the authenticity of childhood, to a world undistracted by pretensions, the way certain pa.s.sions of the flesh were not so much about loving someone else as about finding and expressing one's true and essential self? "Pa.s.sion extinguishes the logic in chronologic," I wrote in my notebook on January 12, a day when rain fell unseasonably and there was thunder and lightning and a wicked yellow sky. What I meant was that pa.s.sion kept one fully in the present, so that time became a series of mutually exclusive "nows." Pa.s.sion obviated history.

But what about migration? Nothing demands such complete attention to the present moment as survival, which, after all, is what the concerted movement from one geographic area to another is about. Yet success-getting there-rests on instinct, the repository of history. In the Old Testament G.o.d tells Moses to lead the Hebrew people out of Egypt and take them to Canaan, the land of milk and honey. It was the first recorded migration, that forty-year trip to bountiful, and as with the monarch migration, none who started the journey completed it. So how had they known where to go? Had they used a sun compa.s.s, relied on topographical cues, followed the stars? Had they been lured by the poles? The Bible says, but not exactly. Through Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Joshua, as the Hebrew people move across the desert, they are led and dragged and prompted by the hand of G.o.d.

The enigmatic, improbable, long-distance, multigenerational movement of monarch b.u.t.terflies has some resonance here. Since it makes so little sense that bugs, living serial lives, could find Canaan each year, and since science has not yet offered a sufficient explanation for how that happens, why not call it numinous and leave it at that? It wouldn't be wrong-surely it wouldn't be wrong-but the fact is, it would be small. It would fail to account for intention, if there is any, and for genetic memory, if that is there, and for the force as fundamental as blood or s.e.x. The wind comes up, the rain comes down, the clouds cover the radial light. The asters have withered, the goldenrod, too, but the monarch, moving south-southwest, twenty-five, forty, eighty-nine miles a day, sure in its mission to survive and reproduce, adjusts. Adaptation, the engine of evolution, is always on full throttle. The constant, variable, unseen, unpredictable accommodations made by a migrating monarch to get to where it needs to go, and its ability to make them, are as essential to its evolutionary design as the shape of its wings or its unpalatability to most birds.

THIS, IT TURNED OUT when I caught up with him in California, was Paul Cherubini's point exactly: the monarch was a remarkably plastic creature, an opportunist able to deal with, and even exploit, what came its way; opportunism was the ultimate evolutionary adaptation. Cherubini, who sold agricultural pesticides for a living, was a provocateur in the monarch world, the one person who could be counted on to take the incendiary position-take it and let it roll among the other monarch enthusiasts as if it were a firecracker about to explode. Then, like a bad boy standing on the fringes, he looked with delight on their horror and revulsion. Lincoln Brower, who could often be found on-line sparring with him, liked to call Cherubini "the exterminator."

If Brower spoke for the b.u.t.terflies from a preservationist's point of view, Cherubini spoke for them from a developer's perspective, though he wasn't one. Rather, he was that rare species of naturalist who despised environmentalists. To him they were corrupt, money-grubbing elitists. He reminded me of some seasonal workers I knew who lived off unemployment for half the year but always voted for whichever candidate vowed to weed out welfare cheats. He was an angry white guy, the kind who always felt left out and disrespected, the kind whose anger-if anyone cared to notice-came from sadness, not from spite.

"I grew up right around San Leandro," Cherubini told me the day he and I went on a road trip together from Sacramento to the Bay Area, looking at the unlikely places monarchs had chosen to breed and roost. "I used to catch monarchs in wild fields, and I saw all these industrial parks coming in and crowding out everything, and there was one particular monarch site that only had five hundred monarchs and it got cut down and I said, 'My G.o.d, what's going to happen?' And I read books like Paul Ehrlich's Population Bomb that said there was going to be world famine by the mid-1970s and I said 'My G.o.d, I don't have a future.' And I got depressed, seriously depressed. And my parents were having marital problems and the psychiatrist wanted to interview me to get a sense about what their problems were but then he realized I had problems, too, and he said, 'You're depressed, why do you think you have no future?' and I said, 'Because these scientists have Ph.D.'s,' and he said, 'That's not right, you're paranoid,' and I said, 'I'm not going to come to you anymore, facts are facts, scientists are scientists.'

"Then when I went to U.C. Davis I had a professor who was able to show me the structure of science and ideology, and also show the business side of science. He was able to show me that a large part of the environmental movement was based on business. I mean, Paul Ehrlich was worth many hundreds of thousands of dollars and had his own private airplane, all derived from those environmental books in addition to collecting his salary from Stanford. And suddenly I realized that especially in [places like] Ivy League colleges it's a big-buck industry to say all this stuff. If you have a Ph.D. you can say the world's oceans are dying and you don't have to be accountable. You can get rich and not be accountable."

We were driving down a superhighway then, eight lanes across, jostled by the truck traffic as Cherubini kept his eyes low to the ground, looking for monarchs and milkweed in the median strips. They were there, though not in the concentrations he had hoped to show me, for the ground was dry and brown and the milkweed had died back. Still, monarchs would stray into his line of vision and he'd point them out as if they proved his point: habitat protection not only was unnecessary, it was a sham. "Some books, articles, and Web sites (including the Monarch Watch Web site) often state that California monarch overwintering sites are 'threatened' or 'steadily disappearing' due to real estate development and hence the western monarch migration is an 'endangered phenomenon,' " Cherubini wrote on D-Plex around the time of my visit with him. "I think the evidence ... from the most heavily urbanized areas of North America refutes that dogmatic interpretation of the situation."

"I don't think there's a limit to development," he said when I asked. It was the obvious question. I didn't think it was the obvious answer.

"Look at Los Angeles," he went on. "Look at an aerial photograph of Santa Monica and the area down to the airport. Every inch of land is taken up except for the golf courses. There's no such thing as a vacant lot. Monarchs just have a ball there. They go into people's yards in the daytime and drink the nectar. And especially when there's a drought, they just love the water sprinklers."

It was a happy thought, all those b.u.t.terflies flitting through all those oscillating sprinklers like little kids frolicking on a hot summer day. I could see how, if you believed in monarchs' "having a ball," it could be quite compelling. And that was not all, Paul was saying.

"In Santa Barbara there is a huge Chevron oil and gas refinery and they have a monarch colony right on the property. It's the largest aggregation in California. You can photograph monarchs right on their billowing smokestacks. When I saw that, I realized the whole idea of fumes' being bad for monarchs was not right. People live to be eighty in downtown Los Angeles."

I wasn't sure how to respond to this. People die from asthma in downtown Los Angeles, too. People have more respiratory problems in Mexico City than in Sioux City. Each of these facts said something-but what?

We were headed for a couple of golf courses near the Bay Area, places that Paul Cherubini thought "broke all the rules" about overwintering habitat. To the north of them there were town houses, to the south the Hayward Airport, to the west the bay. The greens were triangulated in between, open and flat, shaded here and there by eucalyptus trees, especially along the fairways. There was no canopy, no understory, and some seaborne wind. It wasn't like El Rosario, that was for sure. It wasn't even like Natural Bridges State Park, down the coast in Santa Cruz, which, though on the beach, was densely wooded.

"To my mind, if you had all this openness at ten thousand five hundred feet in El Rosario, you'd be flooded with monarchs," Paul said as we dodged the golf b.a.l.l.s that were zipping left and right.

"But you'd never have this much open s.p.a.ce, right?" I asked, gliding like a monarch toward a stand of eucalyptus where I hoped to find sanctuary from predatory Spauldings and Wilsons.

"Well, they've never had the opportunity to develop anything like this," he said, hustling alongside me.

"But would you want to do that?" I asked. "Why would you want to do that?"

"I wouldn't want to lie about it to prevent it from happening," Paul said. "Tell the facts to the people and it's their lives, their property, their decision."

"But there is no habitat in Mexico like this, is there?" I asked. The forests were at ten and eleven thousand feet. They were on the sides of steep mountains. It was not exactly prime golfing terrain.

"No," Paul Cherubini said as we wended through the trees, before making a break for the other side of the fairway. "But they haven't had the opportunity."

WE WENT TO Jack-in-the-Box for lunch. Paul explained how low-fat foods were unhealthy but no one could say that out loud in public because to do so would be to take on a huge part of the economy. He mentioned that there was so little pesticide residue on apples that they didn't need to be washed. He was concerned about nematodes, he said, but there was little to be done about them. He looked normal, but his ideas seemed a little off kilter, tending toward the second gunman/trilateral commission/Vince Foster conspiracy side of things. He talked about a sideline business he was involved in, collecting wild b.u.t.terflies for commercial b.u.t.terfly farms. He sold the monarchs for three dollars apiece; the "farmers" then turned around and sold them for ten dollars each. It was basically free money, and it was coming in fast. He was genuinely baffled when people on the D-Plex list took issue with his doing this; he was even hurt. ("I'm just doing what everyone else is doing," he said. "This is what pays for Chip's research." But it wasn't: Chip Taylor was sending out caterpillars to be raised, not b.u.t.terflies to be released.) Cherubini held ideas like beliefs. They were matters of conviction, of faith, and seemed to come from a deep and personal place. They did not lend themselves easily to the tests of science, but then, as Lincoln Brower often pointed out, Paul Cherubini killed bugs for a living. In his line of work, science was about what did the job best.

He did know a lot about monarchs, though. Cherubini had begun tagging with the Urquharts when he was twelve, and soon after that caught a monarch that had been tagged in Toronto and released in British Columbia. The tagger was another teenage boy. His name was Don Davis.

"As soon as I caught Don Davis's b.u.t.terfly, I was hooked," Paul said. "I knew it would be a lifelong interest in navigation. I said to myself, 'I'm twelve. I have a head start on people who are starting to look at this when they're thirty.' I tagged a whole bunch for the Urquharts. They used to send Canadian monarchs to Reno and California to be released in September to see where they'd end up. I found four of them on the California coast. They were acting like West Coast monarchs."

This notion, that there were two distinct monarch populations in North America, had long been part of the monarch canon. Tagging data from some of the earliest days of the Insect Migration a.s.sociation showed eastern migrants moving in a concerted southwesterly direction, with those breeding west of the Continental Divide moving westward in the winter, toward one or another of the two hundred or so coastal colonies that would form each year in the stands of Monterey pine and eucalyptus that fringed the Pacific. But in fact, as Bob Pyle and Adrian Wenner and others would show, western behavior was not nearly so neat. While a large number of monarchs west of the Rockies did escape the dry inland heat each year by flying to the coast, others in the northern quadrant moved southward, down the coast, from Was.h.i.+ngton State to California in the case of one b.u.t.terfly tagged by Pyle. Still others, in the southern part of the range, actually appeared to move northward, on cooling Santa Ana winds, according to Wenner's data. And to confuse things totally, some western monarchs near the Rockies appeared to head southeasterly, in the direction of El Rosario and Chincua. While the goal was always the same-to turn off reproduction, wait out the winter, and breed in the spring-the strategy was dynamic. As Bob Pyle would conclude in his book Chasing Monarchs, "The old model of the Continental Divide as a kind of Berlin Wall for monarchs is bankrupt."

Paul Cherubini knew this. He was convinced, having watched monarchs in Rocky Mountain National Park "flying all over the place," that "there is no such thing as western monarchs and eastern monarchs." But Cherubini was reckless with what he knew. As a kind of hobby, he would transfer b.u.t.terflies from one part of the continent to the other, from an inland region to the coast, from North to South, from East to West, from the mountains to the plains, to see what they would do, arguing that these "experiments" would further disprove the East-West dichotomy. Although many lepidopterists, especially Lincoln Brower, worried about spreading diseases from one part of the continent to the other, as well as about mixing up genetic stocks, and were calling for a moratorium on such transfers, Cherubini was unmoved.

Brower's concern dated back to the early 1960s, when he had developed a way to "fingerprint" monarchs by using an a.s.say test to a.n.a.lyze the cardenolide content of a b.u.t.terfly's guts. Cardenolide, the chemical that makes milkweed toxic, is found in varying concentrations in different species of milkweed. Brower had perfected a method that allowed him to determine which kind of milkweed a particular b.u.t.terfly had ingested and, since these milkweeds grew in distinct regions, thereby to identify where each b.u.t.terfly had come from. The monarchs he studied in the Neovolcanics, for instance, had all fed on milkweed growing only in the North. Those he tested up North in the spring showed evidence of having ranged in the South. A new test being developed by Canadian scientists reiterated these findings. Using hydrogen isotopes found in monarch wings, it could determine where the b.u.t.terflies found at the Mexican overwintering sites had come from. With both tests, transferring b.u.t.terflies from one region to another might queer the results, not because the tests wouldn't work but because they would.

"Lincoln Brower wrote a big paper on transfers a couple of years ago, about the potential for unknown diseases and for mixing up [the monarchs"] genetics," Cherubini said, defending his position. "Lincoln also says you're going to ruin the flight-record database because you are adding monarchs that wouldn't otherwise be there that may be recorded by field biologists. But my argument is that it's an unlikely mathematical probability that they'd have an encounter with those monarch b.u.t.terflies."

The article Paul was referring to had been published a few years before in BioScience and was coauth.o.r.ed, along with Lincoln Brower, by almost every key monarch researcher in the United States. Chip Taylor's name was there, and Karen Oberhauser's and Bill Calvert's. It carried so many names, it was like a pet.i.tion. Bob Pyle's was missing, but he, too, subscribed to the idea of a moratorium, presenting his own arguments on D-Plex and at the Lepidopterists' Society and in the pages of the Monarch Project's newsletter. Pyle lived up in Gray's River, Was.h.i.+ngton, not a place overrun with monarch b.u.t.terflies, though they were present on occasion. So the mathematical improbability that Paul Cherubini observed worked the other way around, too: the release of monarchs in exotic locales increased the chances of their being sighted where they "did not belong" and mistaken for local inhabitants or naturally occurring transients. Such "strangers" were confusing, and that confusion could be costly, both to the scientific record and to conservation efforts. "In particular," Pyle noted, "northwestern monarch students are just beginning to get a sense of how they really behave up here, and a few thousand, even a few hundred, releases could seriously disrupt our ability to do so. This is the same problem that Professor Kenelm Philip, director of the Alaska Lepidoptera Survey, has with painted lady released in Alaska: rare natural events are obscured by artificial releases, so the opportunity is lost to explore how the natural phenomenon works."

Another natural phenomenon-one that scientists were at no loss to explore-was disease among monarchs, especially a protozoan spore named Ophryocystis electroscirrha, which was pa.s.sed from monarch to monarch during breeding, egg laying, and roosting. Infected larvae suffered developmental defects and often died shortly after birth. Western monarchs appeared to be infected at a much higher rate than monarchs that bred and ranged east of the Rockies-30 percent versus 8 percent. It turned out, too, that the western parasite was much more virulent than the eastern one. It was a natural-born killer. All the more reason, according to Brower and Pyle and Sonia Altizer, then a Minnesota graduate student who had raided Brower's stash of ten thousand frozen monarchs to do historical studies of parasite infestation, to keep eastern and western monarchs apart.

But simply saying that there were distinct western and eastern populations posed a temptation for someone like Paul Cherubini. Even if calling them by those names meant only that they were geographically, not genetically, distinct, and even though genetic studies had shown that there was almost no difference between the mitochondrial DNA of a monarch from the West and that of one from the East (a rather surprising outcome, according to Chip Taylor, since vertebrates tended to "have differences at ten times this level, while other insects showed differences in mtDNA even within a population"). But their designation as eastern and western was a challenge to Cherubini because it was an a.s.sertion he thought he could "prove" wrong by taking a b.u.t.terfly from Salinas, say, bringing it to Minnesota, and tracking its movements after that. In his BioScience collaboration Lincoln Brower had posited that eastern and western monarch populations faced different factors during the long winter months, and different struggles when migrating and dispersing in the spring. It was possible, he suggested, that they had different biological responses, too-responses that had some as-yet-undiscovered physiological basis. He worried that mixing up monarchs from the East with monarchs from the West would impair scientists' ability to figure out if this was true. It might even make it untrue.

"Two purposes have been stated for the current round of b.u.t.terfly transfers," Brower and his colleagues wrote. " 'To determine how California monarchs behave east of the continental divide' (Cherubini, 1994) and to determine if the direction of migration is 'innate ... or determined directly by the b.u.t.terflies from stimuli perceived in the external environment of the release location itself' (Cherubini, 1995). The first question has already been answered by the Urquharts' transfers. Monarchs captured at Muir Beach, California, and released in North Dakota flew south and were recaptured in Nebraska and Kansas (Urquhart and Urquhart, 1974). The second question, unraveling the influences of genetic and environmental factors on monarch orientation and navigation, is more complex. It is not clear how our understanding is to be advanced by haphazard transfers, which lack a carefully designed protocol and are unrelated to any laboratory experiments."

So it was back to that. There were some on the D-Plex list who thought the scientists were ganging up on Paul Cherubini and whipping him around with their degrees, bullying him into a version of science to which he didn't subscribe. The commercial breeders in particular were aggrieved on his behalf, but they tended to lurk at the margins since their activities were even more reviled than Cherubini's own transfer "experiments." They were entomology's lowlifes, people who treated b.u.t.terflies as-in Bob Pyle's disparaging phrase-"biodegradable balloons." And now Cherubini had joined their ranks, picking off chrysalids wherever he could find them, hatching out the b.u.t.terflies and selling them fresh to breeders. The back of his truck was crowded with cages, and the cages were crowded with small green envelopes that swayed like lanterns in the breeze. "I swear to G.o.d I put about thirty thousand dollars into monarch research, and this is the first time I'm actually getting something to pay for it," he said. "I'm just doing what everybody else is doing."

OK, he wasn't just doing what everyone else was doing, but he was doing a lot of it. He had two toll-free numbers on which people could call in to report sightings of the tags he'd printed up. He had been down to Mexico a few times, and back and forth across the country, and once to Australia. He was genuinely interested in monarch b.u.t.terflies, interested in what could only be called a scientific way. But he was not really interested in doing science. He refused to write up his findings; he had turned down a serious offer by Professor Adrian Wenner to coauthor a paper on California monarchs. He was not interested in "peer review," even though he kept on putting out his ideas on D-Plex and watching the scientists knock him about. None of it-not Lincoln Brower's hectoring, not Chip Taylor's patient efforts at damage control each time Cherubini posted a message that contained controversial or erroneous information, not Sonia Altizer's refutations or Bob Pyle's pa.s.sionate pleas-threw him off course. In the drama to which they were all, even Cherubini himself, contributors, Cherubini wanted desperately, earnestly, to play the bad guy. It was the one role in which he could distinguish himself.

"You know what I think? I think maybe they're scared to death about what I'll find out when I do these transfers. I think that maybe they're scared I'll show that California monarchs can get to El Rosario." Cherubini laughed and looked gleeful.

"Actually," he said, lowering his voice, "I already did that. A b.u.t.terfly that I tagged in California and [that] was s.h.i.+pped to Montana was found in Mexico in 1992. An eleven-year-old girl found it. And no one called to tell me. Whoever controls the logbook didn't bother to let me know. I was wondering if the California monarchs would go to Mexico or fly back to California. They all went to Mexico. After that I found out that if you're close to the Continental Divide they can go either way.

"n.o.body knows that Montana monarch came from California. I didn't tell anyone except my close friends. If people knew, they'd say, 'He's done it again. He's threatened the migration,' " Paul Cherubini said, not unhappily.

STILL, NOT ALL genetic mutation was "bad"-or, for that matter, "good." More often than not the natural world remains outside the realm of moral values; questions of good and bad do not come into play. Even so, human behaviors have an inadvertent tendency to spill, like oil pumped with the bilge, beyond our own species. Of the thirteen kinds of b.u.t.terflies found throughout the Hawaiian Islands, for instance, only two are native. The rest are immigrants whose ancestors arrived on hay bales and host plants imported by people. No one knows precisely how the monarch, one of these, got to the islands, or when, but by the midnineteenth century it was resident and common. Even more mysterious was the appearance of a rare genetic variant, a white monarch b.u.t.terfly, at around the same time. Not an albino-that would be all white-but a monarch with its black markings intact and white where there should have been orange.

"The orange pigment is the end product of some metabolic pathway," Dale Clayton, a biologist at Southwestern Adventist University in Keene, Texas, told me, trying to explain how a monarch could become white-or at least not become orange. Clayton and his colleague Dan Petr, another Southwestern Adventist biologist, were the authors of the only field guide to Hawaiian b.u.t.terflies and had probably seen more whites in the wild than anyone-and even that wasn't many.

"I once chased a white monarch down the street in Honolulu. People must have thought I was crazy, running in and out of traffic," Dan mentioned when we talked by phone, and the image of him dodging cars and trucks to get a glimpse of this exceptional creature made me want to see it, too. "If you can be at the road to South Point on the Big Island on January thirtieth early in the morning," Petr offered, "we'll try to find some whites."

"METABOLIC PATHWAYS MAY have three or four or seven or ten or some number of intermediaries, and it takes specific enzymes to convert to the next intermediary," Dale was saying. It was eight-fifteen in the morning on the penultimate day of January and we were sitting in the pair's rental car, driving the South Point road at something under fifteen miles an hour. "If you have a genetic mutation, then that pathway doesn't go to orange." Dale did some calculations on a piece of paper and handed it over the front seat. I looked at the inscrutable symbols he had written down. It was the recipe for white monarch.

Dale also pa.s.sed the road atlas. "This is where we are and this is where we are going," he said, drawing his finger along the road to South Point. The two places were essentially the same. "The road is twelve miles long," Dan explained. "If we take it slow we'll have a pretty good chance of finding a white monarch." By then we had started to cruise the shoulder and I was finding it difficult to listen and look at the same time. Suddenly, without warning, Dan hit the brakes and we stopped short and Dale bailed out of the car, catapulted over a barbed-wire fence, and loped across an uncultivated, weedy field. All this happened without their exchanging more than three words: "Balloon plant," Dan said. "Right," Dale said, already pus.h.i.+ng past the car door.

Balloon plant was a kind of milkweed common to Hawaii, and as Dale waded through it, a handful of monarchs rose up like dust underfoot. No whites, though. "This is like the fis.h.i.+ng business," Dan said to me as we watched Dale swipe his net a few times, then turn and trot back to the car. "Sometimes you catch 'em and sometimes you don't." This was one of those "don't" times.

In another way, it was not slim pickings at all. As we moved slowly toward South Point, the southernmost tip of the United States, the biologists pointed out a gulf fritillary feeding on a pa.s.sion vine, dozens of tiny bean b.u.t.terflies, and the occasional banana skipper. Left and right, all along the road, there were doves and skylarks and grazing cows that spread across the scrubby, tree-bent pastureland as if this were the heartland, not the tropics. It was impossible not to sense the ocean, though, and to expect it, and there it was, finally, at the end of a rutted dirt track, the whole wide expanse of it. We stood there straining our eyes-not at the fishermen casting for pompano, but at the horizon and its promise, seventy-five hundred miles hence, of the next continental landfall: Antarctica.

Back in the car Dan vowed to drive even more slowly and to get out and walk more, for he and Dale were convinced that if we were going to see a white monarch, it was going to be here, on this road. It took us nearly an hour to travel eight miles, and during that time, Dale resumed his genetics lesson and Dan offered an abbreviated history of Hawaiian flora and fauna, which began with the arrival, two thousand years ago, of the Polynesians, bearing twenty-three kinds of plants; touched on the fact that of the forty-five thousand species of mammals in the world, only one, a bat, was native to Hawaii; and ended with the observation that there was little to be found in these islands that was indigenous, an observation that held true for the islands' human populations as well. Although we were progressing, it felt as if we were going nowhere, and then, a little desperately, one of us suggested that we stop back at the field with the balloon plant and make a more thorough inventory. Our last chance. But before we could get there, Dan stopped the car short again and pointed to a different place, a hilly field that was home to a herd of cattle. "See the balloon plant?" he said, and this time we all spilled out of the car, nets drawn, like cops on the heels of a wily suspect.

"There!" Dale called. "There!" I saw a cloud of orange monarchs thirty feet away. Dale moved closer, walking on his toes. And then I saw it, too, a single white monarch needling in among and around the others. It was gorgeous, the way it pulled in the sunlight and sent it out again like a high beam. I followed it with my eyes and got dizzy. Dale, meanwhile, was moving with quiet dispatch through the knee-high gra.s.s. "Come out, come out, baby," he called, and the white monarch heard and buzzed his head. Dale parried his net like a lacrosse stick-once, twice, three times. "Got it!" he cried as Dan and I rushed up, congratulating him the whole way, and he pulled it out so we could admire it, which we did, again and again.

ONCE I HAD SEEN a white monarch aloft against the blue sky, I let the Hawaiian waters draw me in, sailing in a fifty-foot catamaran up the Kona coast toward Puako. The rugged beach there is often home to the Hawaiian green turtle, which feeds on algae growing in its shallow pools. It is not unusual to find the turtles asleep on the lava outcrop-pings or dug into the sand, and to mistake their profile for landscape. It was not possible, however, to mistake the gray whales off our starboard for anything. Migrants, they had come from Arctic waters to breed. "The juveniles gain about three thousand pounds in the three months they're here," said the boat's captain. "The babies are said to grow by something like seven pounds an hour."

Back on sh.o.r.e I went up to Puako to get a bearing on where I'd been. It was a lazy expedition, no agenda, and so I sat on the veranda of the Puako General Store eating lunch, aimlessly regarding a pair of cardinals and the occasional cabbage white b.u.t.terfly-both North American imports, like me. Although I should have been trained by then, it took a while for my eyes to see that there was a hedge of crown flower milkweed not twenty feet in front of me, and monarchs nectaring on its blossoms. Entranced, I moved off the porch to get a better look. The trees were alive with b.u.t.terflies. Continuing down the road, I spied more monarchs, and more crown flowers, and more monarchs. It occurred to me that by now I must have seen thousands of monarch b.u.t.terflies, and still they pulled me down the street as if they had my hand firmly in the grip of theirs. I stopped in front of a small gray house whose entire front lawn had been given over to a flower garden. The garden was teeming with monarchs, and one of them, I noticed, was white. I followed it around to the backyard, where I met the woman of the house, an eighty-seven-year-old native Hawaiian whose face and hands were as topographical as the carefully placed coral that studded her horseshoe beachfront. She was neither startled by my sudden appearance there nor unwelcoming. She pointed to the metal chair beside her on the veranda.

"Don't you have these at home?" she asked as I took a seat beside her and we watched the white monarch chase an orange out to sea, and seemed pleased for herself and sorry for me when I told her we did not. A gust of wind came off the ocean, lobbing the white monarch sh.o.r.eward, and it lay for a long time in the gra.s.s.

The woman told me bits of her story-worked at the flower shop at the Mauna Kea Beach Hotel, used to live up in Volcanoes, raised potatoes, was a retired lei maker. She wanted to feed me, to give me things, to show me pictures, to explain things about natural history. "The monarchs like crown flower because it is syrupy," she said. "Doesn't matter if caterpillars eat my plants. They need food, too." She wanted to know about me, too, who just wandered into her yard the way a b.u.t.terfly might, blown in with the wind.

And then there was nothing to say, so we sat there watching the white monarch going nowhere and the ocean chasing some surfers back to the beach. What is pa.s.sion? I asked myself again. It is the collapse of s.p.a.ce between two or more bodies, I decided as the woman's face drew close to my own. It is strangers meeting in trust because, though their physical histories are unknown to each other, they are connected by what moves them. It is a cliche to talk about love that binds, but love does bind, and that is why pa.s.sion, especially pa.s.sion for a thing, is a way of knowing that comes before epistemology.

"My nephew will continue to feed the insects when I am gone," the woman said at last, answering a question that had not been uttered. No; answering a question that had not been uttered out loud.

Chapter 7.

FEBRUARY CAME, and March, and instead of slinking away, winter socked into the mountains like a thick fog. It snowed on March 14, a heavy, wet snow that clotted the roads, making them impa.s.sable. When the sun came out we put on skis greased with blue wax and flew through the woods as if those skis were wings. Up one hill, down another, stomach to follow, while the chickadees and goldfinches, their feathers mottled as if, having dressed for one season, they were now deciding better of it, moved overhead, no more graceful than we were.

The air was still frigid, topping off at freezing most days, and thoughts of the tropics and of tropical b.u.t.terflies were overwhelmed by the drifts of snow hugging the kitchen windows and the prowl of sanding trucks moving slowly across the frozen pavement. Ice still lay across our pond, a big, un-breachable pane of it, and on sunny days it was possible to look through it like gla.s.s and see last summer's weeds and misthrown tennis b.a.l.l.s and other lost treasures.

It was disconcerting to tune in to Monarch Watch and hear Chip Taylor exclaim about spring and the impending breakup of the Mexican colonies. From where I sat, it was neither warm enough nor green enough to imagine b.u.t.terflies' being able to head north. If there was a human equivalent of the switch that turned off diapause, enabling one's imagination to range beyond the present, mine was disengaged.

Throughout the winter, as the b.u.t.terflies huddled under the canopy of oyamel trees and the traffic on D-Plex slowed, I kept track of another migrant crisscrossing the Mexican border with the regularity of a commuter. By my count, Bill Calvert had been back to Mexico four times since I said good-bye to him in Contepec the previous November. Now here he was again, as the snow was flying in the Adirondacks, writing from Mexico that the spring exodus from El Rosario had begun.

"The monarchs again put on a sterling performance last week!" he reported on March 16. "During our last day in the area, we witnessed a ma.s.sive flow of tens of thousands of b.u.t.terflies flying out of the colony down across a pasture. All of the b.u.t.terflies within three meters of the ground were flying in the same direction, giving the impression of a ma.s.sive sheet of orange-and-black-colored creatures streaming slowly downward. At the middle of the pasture there was a seep of water. Thousands of monarchs were at the seep drinking water from the water-soaked mud and from open pools, but the majority were flying on past the seep. Above three meters fewer b.u.t.terflies were flying in the opposite direction back toward the colony.

"This colony was the Rosario 'bud colony.' It was the lower part of the Rosario colony that had budded off from the main colony, which occupied a site in the same drainage, but at a higher elevation. Each day more b.u.t.terflies left the upper (original) colony and joined the bud colony. At this point in time (March 11), it was hard to tell whether the bud colony or the main colony had more b.u.t.terflies. The bud colony was stopped from descending to even lower elevations by fields and pastures that came all the way up to three thousand meters' elevation. Monarch colonies always descend the mountain during the course of the [winter], accelerating during late February and March when the combination of intense suns.h.i.+ne and lack of clouds and moisture in the air warms up the ambient considerably. The descent is almost always a.s.sociated with a particular arroyo or drainage.

"At Rosario they usually follow the drainage called Arroyo Los Conejos. However, this year they used another drainage about 1.5 kilometers to the northwest of Los Conejos, called the Rio Grande by the locals. When we were there (well into the dry season), there was only a little water flowing in it.

"The lack of forest at the field edge did not stop them entirely, however. During the day b.u.t.terflies poured out of the bud colony and over the ridge at the little community, La Salud, toward Angangueo. These b.u.t.terflies are undoubtedly part of the return migration to the United States and Canada. Each day tens of thousands pa.s.s through the town of Angangueo. They are all going in the same direction-northward. Back toward Rosario, many thousands are taking nectar from flowering plants, especially eupatorium and senecio along the road to Angangueo. Many of these do not return to the bud colony mentioned above. Instead they bud again, forming smaller aggregations in remnant pieces of woods along the Angangueo-Rosario road. These small remnants of woodland may be very important to them in offering nighttime shelter from cold and predators."

CALVERT'S MESSAGE APPEARED not on D-Plex but on Journey North, an educational Internet site dedicated to tracking the northward progress of a number of spring migrants, monarch b.u.t.terflies included. Every week from the end of winter to the beginning of summer, migration updates were posted and maps drawn. Texas, Louisiana, Missouri, Kansas, Illinois, Ohio: it was like a national wave cheer as the monarchs swept through.

The b.u.t.terflies were dispersing across a wide swath of the country. This was one of the main characteristics of the spring migration. Having come from that wide swath and then funneled into Mexico in the fall, the b.u.t.terflies simply went out of it in reverse, leaving together through the narrow channel of the funnel, then scattering into the big wide world. We tend to think of a migration as a movement from one place to another-from Ontario, say, to Michoacn. The spring migration, from a few very concentrated places in the south to the entire eastern segment of the United States and parts of Canada, seemed less that than a random dispersal. Still, the monarchs were s.h.i.+fting habitats to take advantage of abundant food and places to lay eggs as spring and summer moved north through the flora-the very definition of migration. Meanwhile, milkweed, though not migratory, was doing a wave cheer of its own, reborn at higher and higher lat.i.tudes as the soil heated up, and the air warmed, and daylight limbered, stretching, stretching, and stretching some more.