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
N INETEEN 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 goodshowing 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 theabandoned 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
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
N INETEEN 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 goodshowing 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 theabandoned 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
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