Four Wings and a Prayer

by Sue Halpern

  OUTSIDE IN the Erindale parking lot, the sky was conspicuously free of bug life, at least at an observable level—a result, perhaps, of the wind, which was gusting. We were looking straight up, heads bent back as far as they could go, and nothing, nothing, nothing was in our line of sight, and then a kestrel. “This bird is gliding, by the way, it’s not soaring, and it’s going between thermals,” David said. “It just picked up a thermal,” he reported a minute later. “See it circling? See the circle? It’s going in a circle and gaining altitude.”

  “When we were up there circling, we were playing,” I said. “When nonmigratory birds ascend in thermals, are they playing?”

  “I doubt it,” David said, keeping his eyes fixed overhead. “They’re looking for food, checking out their environment, being shoppers, watching for other individuals, displaying to their mates, keeping cool. Crows, yeah. Crows tease.”

  On this day, though, the butterflies were teasing, having promised, by showing up in large numbers in years past in this part of the world in this part of August, that they would be here now.

  “Despite all the observations you’ve made here over the years, empiricism seems no more precise than divination,” I said to David when still, half an hour later, not a single monarch had flown by. I was hot, my neck hurt, and my eyes were going blurry. I was ready to pack it in.

  Gibo did not for a second loosen his posture. “We need more data,” he said. As if that would be enough. In the meantime, for him, the middle of the story was just as compelling as its end.

  Chapter 9

  AT JUST ABOUT the same time that the monarch spotted at forty-five hundred feet over Worcester, Massachusetts—the one David Gibo surmised was on its way to the Atlantic coast at Rhode Island—would have been in sight of Cape May, New Jersey, I was getting there myself. Cape May Point, a spit of land that looked from certain perspectives as if it were rudely elbowing the ocean, had long been a draw for birders, who gathered there in great numbers, especially in the fall, when the sheer numbers of migrating songbirds, raptors, and water fowl could darken the sky—or at least seem to. Nearly four hundred bird species had been identified there. The checklist I was carrying in the back pocket of my jeans listed 391 in all and noted that John James Audubon had spent time in the nearby swamps and marshes, executing some of his well-known bird studies. The Cape May Migratory Bird Refuge was at the joint of the elbow, where the Atlantic Ocean and the Delaware Bay mingled. Farther inland, but not far from the water in any case, was the Cape May Bird Observatory, one of the most active ornithological education centers in the country. Walk along the trail to Higbee Beach, stop at Stone Harbor or the Seventh Street Sea Watch, and others would be stopped there too, eyes trained upward or fixed on a particular tree limb. Stroll down Beach Drive, the wide esplanade fronting the ocean, and among the sunbathers and kite fliers and fudge eaters, would be an uncommissioned army of birders, easily identifiable by the Leica Trinovids and Bausch & Lomb Elites hanging on neoprene straps around their necks—benign but expensive ordnance.

  Lepidoptery is a lesser franchise on Cape May, but a growing one. There are 105 known butterfly species on the cape, and its peninsular shape has made it a refuge for migrating monarchs. Birders looking for passing hawks often picked them up in their spotting scopes, in numbers that made them seem like winged rain.

  Dick Walton was one of these. The author of a number of books that were part of the ornithological canon, as well as a series of popular birding-by-ear instructional tapes, he had gone down to Cape May from his home in Concord, Massachusetts, on October 10, 1982, to witness the legendary hawk migration. It did not disappoint. On that day 2,622 sharp-shinned hawks, 62 Cooper’s hawks, 50 peregrines, and 130 merlins passed overhead. But Walton was seeing something else as well, as he observed in his journal: “All day long we witnessed a phenomenal monarch migration. The butterflies were as constant and continuous as the hawks.” And it wasn’t just that year. The pattern—hawks and monarchs migrating on the same wind—continued in subsequent years, piquing Walton’s interest. Dick Walton is a freelance natural historian and, though primarily a bird-watcher, he was not content simply to look at the butterflies going by.

  “In the fall of 1990 I decided to spend two weeks in Cape May with the idea of planning a long-term research project on monarch migration (what the heck—somebody has to do the work),” he recalled. “I tried out several census methodologies at various places on Cape May Point. At Sunset Beach on September 27, in eight one-minute observation periods, I counted 618 monarchs, for an average of 77 monarchs per minute. The following day I counted over a thousand monarchs streaming through Cape May Point State Park. Although there were plenty of monarchs, there were also many puzzles. One of my first discoveries, while counting monarchs at Cape May State Park, was that the direction of the migratory flight seemed to reverse itself for no apparent reason. At one point a steady stream of monarchs would be heading southwest and then within the space of ten minutes, the whole flight would be going northeast. When I returned home I puzzled over the data, and even though there were more questions than answers, I was convinced Cape May would be an ideal site for my study. So I wrote Lincoln Brower that December and we began discussions about setting up the project.”

  The project, though billed as the Monarch Migration Association of North America, was really just Dick Walton, an assistant, a car, and a hand-held, nonautomated counter. The idea was to establish a census route through Cape May that would be followed three times a day in order to begin amassing data on the numbers of monarchs migrating through Cape May each fall. While the figures for any one year would be interesting in and of themselves, it was the accumulation of data that would be most telling. “Good” years and “bad” years, “big” days and “small” ones—all would settle out, or become revealing, over time.

  It was this data, eight years out, that brought me to Cape May on one particular day. Historically, September 19 was a big day there, a day on which in previous years thousands of monarchs had flooded the skies and clustered on the trees and nectared in the pocket parks. If the data were any guide, September 19 was the day to be in Cape May—especially, I reasoned, if the butterflies seemed to be scarce elsewhere. Either they’d be here, and that would be significant, or they wouldn’t, and that would be significant, too. It was win-win, though I’d rather prevail by witnessing a deluge of monarch butterflies.

  DICK WALTON MET ME at the hawk watch bench at Cape May Point. The bench is a raised platform bordered by railings, equidistant from a marsh (good for sighting waterfowl), the beach (good for sighting shorebirds), and the parking lot (good for sighting the latest in ornithological gear). Most days it fills early, as curious tourists and serious birders sit shoulder to shoulder looking into the sky. Even among these, Dick Walton was recognizable. Bearded, with a worn Red Sox cap on his head, sporting an ancient pair of binoculars, he looked like he belonged there.

  “We do three census runs per day, at nine, twelve, and three o’clock,” he told me. “They take fifteen minutes each. We note the date, the temperature, the cloud cover, the wind direction, and the wind speed, determined by leaf movement. It’s pretty standard, and it’s fairly subjective. Any observation is.

  “On the census runs we’re not trying to count all the monarch butterflies in Cape May. We’re taking a sample. If you sample along a route long enough, it will become more accurate. You might see thousands over at the hawk bench, and up on the dunes, but this is more accurate. There you’re getting flight reversals. You’re counting the same butterflies more than once. They’re deciding whether or not to cross Delaware Bay—it’s eleven miles. We know they cross open water because we see them when we take the ferry. But the wind has to be right or they turn back, which is when you start to miscount. Our census spreads it out so we get a better idea of what’s really going on. If you want to census dogs in New York City,” he concluded, “you wouldn’t want to go to a fire hydrant.”

  It was not quite
nine in the morning. We drove out of the parking lot toward the Cape May Lighthouse, then turned up Lighthouse Avenue and headed for the Higbee Beach Wildlife Management Area on the bay side, where the census began. Dick pulled up to the parking lot, which was already full—it was a hot spot for birders—and then he turned around and consulted his watch. The census was due to begin on the hour. And it would have, if twenty people hadn’t been stationed in the road, looking for a particular warbler in a particular tree. We eased out slowly, picking our way around them and then working up to a steady twenty-five miles an hour, the uniform census speed. Some days Walton was followed by another person in another car making her own, independent count, but not today. It was just the two of us, and the rule was that we were not to tell each other when we saw a monarch. We were not to twitch or make any sort of movement that might give it away. Dick Walton held his counter out the window on the left side. I held mine out the right. He didn’t want either of us to influence the other.

  “Most butterflies disappear when it’s cloudy,” Dick said. He was driving one-handed, scanning the sides of the road, the middle distance, the sky, his eyes moving quicker than his car. “Once I was doing the census in a nor’easter and saw one blowing down the beach. It didn’t want to be flying. I counted it.” He turned onto Bayshore Road, hugging the shoulder, letting the other cars pass.

  “Sometimes I think I should have a banner so people know why I’m driving like this,” he said.

  I was concentrating on the farmland we were passing, looking hard for monarchs and seeing none. I thought I had noticed Dick tapping his clicker, and I wondered if I had missed one, or more than one. It was making me anxious, tetchy.

  “Did you know that Cape May is the lima bean capital of the world?” Dick asked as we passed a processing plant called the Beanery. No, I didn’t. “Seaside goldenrod is a good source of nectar,” he said a minute later. I wondered if this was a clue and scanned the plants as we passed by, but still I saw no monarchs.

  We turned off Bayshore and drove in the direction of the bay. So far the big day wasn’t happening. Even my poker-faced driver seemed disappointed. “Negative data are good,” he said, “but they’re not much fun to collect.” Maybe he hadn’t seen any butterflies after all. We drove past the light-house again. “We just need a little more brightness,” he said, “but I don’t think we’ll get it on this run.” Click. I heard his counter tally a butterfly, just like punctuation. I looked around madly, didn’t see a monarch, and left my counter registering a row of zeros. Now we were zigging and zagging through the residential neighborhood between Lily Lake and the sand dunes. It was seventy-three degrees and overcast. A monarch was crossing the road. “There, look!” I said, waving my hands excitedly. Dick Walton shot me a bemused look. So much for “double blind.” I had given it away. I heard his counter click again.

  It was 9:17 on the morning of the big day. Total number of monarchs sighted: two. We returned to the hawk watch bench, where Dick Walton gave me an impromptu lesson in identifying birds in the sky. There were thousands of tree swallows sailing about, with a big bird laboring among them.

  “Tell me about that big bird,” Dick Walton said. “What do you notice about it?”

  “It’s big,” I said.

  “It’s an immature bald eagle,” he said.

  “Where?” said a chorus of voices. The hawk watchers turned from what they had been doing and searched for the eagle.

  “This is great,” said a portly man in shorts and a photographer’s vest, sporting a Cape May Observatory hat on his head. “I didn’t look at birds till I retired here,” he said to me. “I used to think people who looked at birds were nerds. An immature bald eagle—haven’t seen too many of those. Wish I had started doing this a long time ago.”

  Dick pointed above a stand of cedars. “Now there’s a good bird,” he said. Again, as if on point, the birders turned and tried to pick up what he was seeing. “Can you tell from the shape of the wing what it is?” he asked me. I couldn’t.

  “It’s an osprey,” he said. Another bird of prey. And there, at a hundred feet, was some prey, a lone monarch gliding in exactly the same direction the wind was blowing.

  IN ADDITION TO creating a historical record of monarch butterfly behavior at Cape May, Walton’s Monarch Migration Association of North America (MMANA) sought to do something else as well: to demonstrate, once and for all, that the movement of monarch butterflies down the East Coast of the United States was not an aberration; to show, through numbers and constancy, that there was a real and established Atlantic flyway that led to the Mexican overwintering sites. This had been a matter of dispute for at least a decade, beginning with Lincoln Brower, then a professor at Florida, squaring off against—again—Fred and Norah Urquhart. It was the Urquharts’ understanding, based on their tagging data, that monarchs found on the East Coast had drifted there unwittingly, the victims of winds that carried them southeast instead of southwest.

  After the first four years of the Cape May census project, it looked as if the evidence would eventually prove the Urquharts wrong. As Brower and Walton wrote in the Journal of the Lepidopterists’ Society after correlating their findings with data from the North American Butterfly Association’s annual Fourth of July butterfly count, “During the four-year period of our study we have consistently recorded large numbers of monarchs at Cape May, New Jersey, [and] have also regularly observed migratory behaviors including 1) mass movements along beach and dune lines; 2) a high degree of directionality …; 3) roost formations; and 4) significant build-ups and exoduses on consecutive days. Another notable characteristic has been the timing of the fall movement. In each of the four years studied, the numbers of migrants peaked during the third week of September.” Therefore, they concluded, “our Cape May observations argue in favor of describing the Atlantic coast migrants as routine constituents in the monarch’s fall migration. The numbers and behavior of monarchs observed leave little doubt that a significant migration has occurred at Cape May in each year of our censuses. Aspects of the timing of the migration, in particular the recurring September peaks, also indicate a routine passage of monarchs. Such consistent timing would be unlikely if they were caused solely by weather conditions such as cold fronts, because the latter do not occur at the same time each year. Finally, the correspondence of the Cape May and 4JBC [Fourth of July butterfly count] data sets suggests that the number of monarchs passing through Cape May is representative of northeastern breeding populations as a whole. If this correlation holds in future years, it will strengthen the hypothesis that the Cape May migration is representative of the population of northeastern monarchs, rather than comprising an ‘aberrant’ group displaced by atypical weather conditions as hypothesized by the Urquharts.”

  Now, with four more years of research completed, Brower and Walton’s conclusions still held. While the numbers of monarchs passing through Cape May fluctuated from year to year, their presence was constant. Monarchs could be seen up in thermals with the migrating hawks and roosting in the trees around town. If in decades past their aggregations had been merely the subject of anecdote—the late Roger Tory Peterson, for one, “recalled from visits to Cape May in the early 1930s trees so completely covered with monarchs that they were ‘more orange than green’ ”—the MMANA census data lent those observations weight. (“Those folks lucky enough to have been in the Cape May area on either September 19th or 26th were treated to a blizzard of monarchs,” Dick Walton reported in his annual summary for 1997. “In fact, on the 26th, 652 monarchs were counted on the three census runs. This eclipsed all previous records for daily run totals. Observers at the [hawk bench], Higbee, Cape May Meadows and even along the streets of downtown Cape May reported hundreds, even thousands, of monarchs on both of these days.”)

  But that was a year earlier. On this September 19, a casual observer would have been hard pressed to discern a migration at all. All day, it seemed, we were busy looking through our binoculars from the hawk ben
ch, or inching our way down New England Avenue, collecting negative data.

  And that day, it turned out, was not unusual. Throughout the 1998 migration season, Dick Walton and his associates noted that the number of monarchs passing through Cape May was less than half what it had been the previous year. Walton attributed the paucity to the Mexican drought and early storms in the northern breeding range. Still, he couldn’t say for sure.

  What he could say, though—finally and, at the end of 1998, conclusively—was that the Urquharts had been wrong. For the first time since 1992, when MMANA began tagging monarchs, butterflies tagged at Cape May had been recovered in Mexico, at the El Rosario colony. And not just one or two—seven had been found there. But it got even better than that: four Cape May butterflies had also been recaptured farther down the coast, in Virginia. The data were like those chemicals that reverse invisible ink: once they were applied, the Atlantic flyway that Lincoln Brower and Dick Walton had always assumed was there at last revealed itself.

  AT SOME POINT, of course, the monarchs that flew down the eastern seaboard and then to Mexico had to swing inland. Maybe they turned in the Carolinas, or maybe they hugged the coast to the thumbnail of Florida, where, confronted with open water and its maniacal choice, ocean or gulf, they chose the gulf. Whatever their course, there was still no evidence to support either notion, just the tantalizing fact that some coastal monarchs found their way, somehow, to El Rosario.

  “It’s a real enigma, the flow of monarch butterflies down the East Coast,” Chip Taylor said to me again one day when I was visiting the Monarch Watch office in Lawrence. “Why do we have these big holes?” He pointed to the map of tagged monarch recoveries, the one that had no red pinpoints anywhere in the Southeast. “The longitudinal data are great, but the recoveries don’t meet up with our expectations regarding latitude.” He tapped the hole in the map with his pen. “The butterflies ought to be turning right.”