Four Wings and a Prayer

by Sue Halpern

  But even limits could easily be subverted. Just how easily was demonstrated to me one afternoon in El Rosario. The conference was over; the scientists, bureaucrats, and farmers had made their proposals, most of which had to do with compensating local residents for preserving the forest. Threats had been made (“If you do not give us what we want, we will take what you want”). The lepidopterists wondered how their discipline had become a branch of social science. The economists had declared that environmental consciousness must come after rural development, while the preservationists worried that economic development would destroy the environment before any consciousness could take hold.

  Bill Calvert, who had heard it all before and did not place too much stock in talk in any event, was ready to go out and do some real work. The Mazda was resaddled, a new tape popped into the microrecorder, the digital scale recalibrated. Calvert wanted to visit the preserves and get some butterfly weights. He was still guessing that despite their long journey, the butterflies would be fat and in good shape. Two other naturalists, both Americans who had never seen a Mexican overwintering site, accompanied us. It was mid-November, and the monarchs had just recently started to return to the area.

  We drove to Ocampo, a small settlement that led to the spot where the trail began, and followed the road farther in, to El Rosario. I had been to this very place just three years before, but I did not recognize it. Where there had been a single dirt track leading to the preserve, there was now a wide concrete thoroughfare; where there had been a couple of shacks from which boys peddled bottles of soda, there were now fifty such structures shingling their way up the path, filled with trinkets, film, and food. There was a designated parking area and small children who greeted us and told us where to park and asked for money to watch our stuff. We had come on opening day—the first day of the season. A party was in progress; we had just missed the parade. Hundreds of paper butterflies were scattered on the ground. But the real action was in the air. We counted 103 monarchs in forty-five seconds.

  We paid the fee and started up the trail, accompanied by a Mexican guide. Although the trail was well marked, guides were required. Think security guard here, not interpretive nature guide.

  While there were thousands of butterflies hanging in the air, the most dramatic clusters were about fifty feet off the marked trail, in the woods. Between us and the butterflies was a barbed-wire fence, the serious, three-string kind meant to keep people like us at bay. But when one of the American naturalists asked our Mexican guide for the fourth time if it would be possible for us to get a closer look—indicating that he would make it worth the guide’s while—the guide looked left and right, then quickly lifted the fence, signaling us to slip under.

  The four of us hustled to a secluded spot, sat down at the base of an oyamel, and just looked. Calvert whispered that there were about five million butterflies above us. He apologized to the naturalists, whose eyes could hardly take it all in: “There’ll be a lot more in a few weeks,” he told them.

  Later we hiked out surreptitiously and found ourselves in the middle of a newly reforested part of the preserve, where we tried with moderate success to avoid trampling the seedlings. Our guide had pocketed eight dollars for lifting the fence. What incentive had he had not to?

  Chapter 3

  NINETEEN NINETY-SEVEN WAS a good year for eastern monarchs. All across their range, from Texas to Canada, and especially throughout the Midwest, they were seen in unprecedented numbers. “On 28 August I witnessed perhaps the largest flight of monarchs I’ve ever seen,” a man from Ancaster, Ontario, e-mailed the D-Plex list. “This was south across the extreme western end of Lake Ontario in southern Ontario at Hamilton.… In the two hours, from 3 P.M. to 5 P.M., that I observed before the flight stopped, I estimated that about 120,000 passed. It’s quite possible that they started at 10 A.M., as conditions were good throughout. If so, more than a half million passed on this single day.”

  A month later, from Bronte, Texas, Jerita Taylor, a high school science teacher, reported, “Each year we have a good showing of monarchs, but this year was spectacular. Thousands of them stopped over in our area. We all turned on our water sprinklers to help them on their journey. (Citizens are encouraged to water their lawns during the migration in Texas, to provide water for the migrating butterflies.) Many of the children had never seen them before, and the school yard was covered on Monday, September 29, because of a heavy dew that morning. We are not very proficient in counting or estimating the numbers that visited us, but the ones who know say this was a banner year.… They covered the ground, shrubs, trees, wherever there was water.”

  And then, on October 28, came this message from Monterrey, Mexico: “Since last Sunday, the twenty-sixth, we have witnessed what I think is one of the most impressive migrations in years. Just imagine—on the radio and TV, municipal authorities are appealing to the citizenship to slow down their cars on the major routes to reduce butterfly casualties!”

  It was the next week that Bill Calvert and I headed to Mexico ourselves, hoping to catch up with the butterflies.

  Before that, back home in the mountains of New York State, the numbers had seemed unusually high to me, too. This was just a feeling, since I hadn’t been keeping count. In the decade we had lived in our shambling old house at the edge of the wilderness, I had grown so used to looking out the kitchen window to the pond and the fields and mountains behind it that I carried within me a mental image of the landscape. It was not that I could draw it from memory, or even catalog its parts. It was that I knew, with the quickest of glances, when something was askew. The red fox that sometimes skulked around the far field, the deer that browsed at the periphery of the forest, the snapping turtles near the abandoned beaver lodge, whose round black backs took in the midday sun—I would always know they were there before I had fully registered what I was seeing.

  The butterflies were like this, too. In May I might glimpse only a shadow as it crossed the driveway, but I would know an eager mourning cloak had unfurled the leafy bedroll where it had spent the winter. After that I’d keep my eyes open. The yellow, black, and blue tiger swallowtails would be next, and then the white admirals, which were really mostly black, then the red admirals, then the great spangled fritillaries; it was as if one species begot the other. Then, finally, in July, the first monarchs would arrive, and I would know because my eyes would have grown accustomed by then to the anxious flight of big orange fritillaries, the way they darted this way and that, and then there would be this other winged creature, big and orange, too, but even-keeled and graceful.

  ON JULY 7 of that year I saw my first monarch and followed it to the milkweed patch behind the basketball hoop at the edge of the driveway. The milkweed, which is entwined with a stand of raspberry canes, was doing the line-out-the-door kind of business most restaurateurs only dream of: it was buzzing, wing-to-wing, with hundreds of nectaring bumblebees and butterflies. In the days that followed I would sometimes check the undersides of the milkweed for monarch eggs, and on the twenty-third, at midday, I saw one. It was white and about the size of a piece of sleep in the eye. Three hours later, when I brought my daughter out to see it, it was gone. We inspected the leaf carefully and still almost missed the tiny, striped eyelash of a caterpillar that had just hatched out. We checked other leaves: more caterpillars. The patch was “in production.”

  It stayed like that for weeks, a bevy of mating and egg laying and egg hatching and caterpillar growth and metamorphosis. Egg, larva, chrysalis, butterfly: it was the big show in its smallest, most commonplace rendering. My notebook entry for August 19 said it all: “Monarchs in all stages everywhere now.”

  THAT YEAR the fall migration to Mexico had been preceded by a remarkably prolific springtime population. “The remigration in the spring of 1997 was nothing short of spectacular,” Chip Taylor noted for Monarch Watch. “The numbers of adults, eggs and larvae reported by observers were truly amazing. The monarchs also appeared to arrive earlier than usual in m
any locations. This may have been due to favorable weather but the large number of monarchs could also have been a factor.”

  What happened then was that the butterflies spread out across their entire range, from Texas up to Canada, from the Atlantic to the Rockies. Everywhere people might have seen monarchs, they did. In Lancaster, in Mankato, in Newark, in Buffalo, in Lincoln. And then they began to see them in unlikely places, too, such as Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, two hundred miles north of any known milkweed. There were so many monarchs looking for places to breed and nectar that the range was pushed to its limits. Nonetheless, according to Professor Taylor, “favorable reports continued throughout the summer, leading me to speculate that the fall migration would be extraordinary. It was.”

  So there were lots of butterflies, and people were thrilled to see them in such large numbers, thrilled to walk out of their houses and find them basking in their driveways or clustered in the pines or resting on the ledges of urban skyscrapers. The number of postings to Monarch Watch increased, too, as observers from all over North America recorded their exclamations. It was exciting to watch the numbers and places appear on the screen—exciting the way an election is if your candidate is winning, exciting like the Women’s World Cup.

  In the Blue Ridge foothills of Virginia, though, one man was brooding: Lincoln Brower, the former Stone Professor of Biology at Amherst College, the Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Zoology at the University of Florida, and the current Research Professor of Zoology at Sweet Briar College. Brower looked at the numbers and was unimpressed. No—it was more than that. Professor Brower was disturbed by the numbers of monarchs he was seeing. They scared him. To Brower, so many monarchs were a sign of trouble.

  LINCOLN BROWER is a generous, thoughtful man. An academic for forty years, he looks the part: tousled gray hair, glasses, rumpled corduroys, elbow patches on his sports coat. In many ways, Brower is the yang to Bill Calvert’s yin. Where Calvert spends most of his time in the field, Brower spends his in the lab. Where Calvert is a loner, Brower has acolytes—dozens of young, loyal graduate students scattered across the world. Where Calvert is rail-thin, Brower is … rounder. Where Calvert is laconic and cool, Brower is vocal, and sometimes ardent. Where Calvert studiously avoids institutional affiliations, Brower has been in the thick of academia for most of his life. The university has served him well. Brower is the author of hundreds of scientific papers, many of them the result of original and ground-breaking research. He has been the recipient of a dozen National Science Foundation grants. He holds the Gold Medal for zoology from London’s esteemed Linnean Society. It was Brower who convinced the United States government to cosponsor the Morelia conference, Brower who had access to the secretary of the interior. It was he who designed the Mexican butterfly preserves after the 1986 presidential decree. No one, not even Bill Calvert, has a more comprehensive understanding of monarch biology than Lincoln Brower. This is widely recognized. Even the ejidatarios had heard of Professor Brower, and if they resented his intrusion into their lives and livelihoods, they still acknowledged his scientific expertise. It was to Brower, in fact, that Dimas Salazaar, the farmer from Zitacuaro, addressed his plea—Brower, that is, who Salazaar believed could talk to the butterflies. This was because more than anyone else, Lincoln Brower spoke for them as well.

  Still, the 1986 decree was a keen point of conflict. It had been Brower’s idea to create a core zone and a buffer zone; he expected the buffer to protect the core. Instead, the people who relied on the forest saw the buffer zone as the only economically viable place left to them and stepped up logging and farming there. And of course there was the matter of boundaries: who could tell what was buffer and what was not? A certain amount of illegal logging was the result of this confusion.

  Over time Lincoln Brower had come to agree with the ejidatarios: the system was flawed, and stupid. But where they wanted the decree to be scrapped altogether, he wanted it to be rewritten: the core would be expanded, and there would be no more buffer. This did not endear Brower to the ejidatarios. Earlier in the year, at a meeting to discuss buying the land outright, one of them had pulled a gun on him. Brower had been annoyed. The man was getting in the way of a serious discussion.

  “It’s not just that I want to protect the oyamel trees per se because I’m a tree hugger,” Brower explained one afternoon in Mexico, as we drove to Cerro Pelón, one of the Mexican forest preserves that he and a graduate student were mapping by examining satellite data to monitor the density of the tree cover there. We had been driving around all day, looking at trees and collecting samples of nectar. This was for another study Brower was doing, one that would measure the food supplies available to butterflies in the area; he was convinced that if agriculture—especially industrialized agriculture, with its reliance on herbicides—was established too close to the colonies, the consequences would be devastating. “This is a unique ecosystem, and the whole damn system is collapsing,” he said.

  True though that might be, it was also classic Brower—definitive, encompassing, uncompromising, gloomy. (From a paper published in 1994: “[The nine overwintering sites] harbor virtually the entire gene pool of the eastern population.… The small size of the area portends disaster for the future of the eastern population.”) Depending on whom you asked, the professor was an Oracle or a Cassandra—something mythic, in either case.

  Brower was not by nature a melancholy man. The state of the Mexican forests weighed heavily on him, and it angered him, but it had not caused him to lose hope. At sixty-six, he was far too involved in life to be overwhelmed by it. He had started collecting butterflies when he was five, and though he no longer pinned them, he was still actively pursuing them. Butterflies, particularly monarchs, were the text on which everything he did was written. To say he was consumed by them would only begin to touch on the depth of his commitment and the emotion he brought to his work.

  “I’ve probably handled a hundred thousand monarch butterflies in my lifetime and still see them as magic,” Brower told me months after we had left Mexico, when he was showing me around his laboratory at Sweet Briar College. “I think of them as magical bottles of wine: you can pour it all out, and when you go back, it’s full again. There is no end to the questions you can ask.”

  The lab was a mess, with books and papers and pipettes and pinned collections of lepidoptera, one made when Brower was a high school student in New Jersey, piled high on tables. Five red Mylar balloons that said “I Love You” were stuck to the ceiling, their white grosgrain ribbons suspended in the air like jet trails. In one corner of the room were three steel freezers, the size and style of those you might see in a college cafeteria. I opened one. It was stocked, from floor to ceiling, with plastic bags full of dead monarchs, their signature orange and black markings just visible beneath the hoar of frost. There were ten thousand of them, dating back to 1976.

  “You never know when they’ll come in handy,” Brower said, though he didn’t say for what. He did explain that he had only recently dismantled his lab at the University of Florida and had the contents shipped to Virginia. He was just getting reorganized. He had not really retired, he said, only relocated. (His new wife, Linda Fink, was a biology professor at Sweet Briar and his sometime collaborator.) The “I Love You” balloons were for an experiment he would be doing the next day on butterfly navigation.

  Until recently Brower had shied away from navigation and orientation, concentrating instead on questions that had to do, in one way or another, with chemical ecology. He was an experimental biologist; he had an abiding belief in the necessity, and the beauty, of the scientific method.

  “Science is like a language. You have to have a grammar and you have to have rules. It’s a universal language because anyone can do it, no matter what his or her native tongue is. What we get from a lot of amateurs is ‘I saw five butterflies down at the baseball park on Sunday at five o’clock.’ If they went out there every year at the same time and watched what was going on and th
en published the data, it would be valuable. If you compare a really carefully done experiment with some half-assed little anecdotal report and give them equal weight, that, to me, is not acceptable science.”

  Brower was getting agitated. Here he was, a biologist, a professor, and yet also the object of more enmity than he, or his station, deserved. And it went way back, to the discovery of the overwintering sites themselves, when the Canadian biologist Fred Urquhart had published hints as to the overwintering sites’ whereabouts in National Geographic, and Brower, hoping to do some research there himself, had written to ask for more specific directions. When he was rebuffed, he gave the National Geographic article to Bill Calvert, and Calvert figured out where the sites were.

  “It was January 1977. We were in the forest trying to measure the temperature above the ground. We had thermometers strung at different heights. It was very cold. One of our guides had lit a fire. By chance, Urquhart was there that day, too. I went up to him and stuck out my hand. He refused it and said, ‘How did you get here?’ Shortly afterward, Urquhart wrote an article accusing me of smoking out the butterflies. Then scores of people who read it wrote nasty letters to the president of Amherst College, where I was teaching, accusing me of killing butterflies. It was very divisive.” Brower was cast as a villain among his natural constituents, the amateur lepidopterists.

  Urquhart’s followers, who numbered in the hundreds, had been tagging monarchs in Canada and the United States, hoping to learn where the butterflies went in the winter and by which routes. To them Brower was an interloper; to him, they were unsystematic. In his language, that meant they were gnats, bothersome but inconsequential. Gracious though he was, courtly though he could be, Lincoln Brower could also be short with anyone who didn’t think the way he did. He wasn’t out to make friends. He was after the truth, and when he found it, he wanted to let others know. If the truth demanded action, then surely they would want to hear that.