The Rarest of the Rare

by Diane Ackerman

  In Adrian Forsyth and Ken Miyata’s classic Tropical Nature, they suggest that you “do not beat a hasty, embarrassed retreat” after nature calls “but sit quietly nearby” and watch what happens to the dung, because it will teach you much about how the rain forest works. First there will be the scarab beetles, then feeding and contesting flies. There may be as many as fifty species of dung beetle before the whole show is over. In part, they explain, this is because our dung is protein-rich, whereas the normal carnivore dung insects encounter “consists mostly of bones, feathers, and hair, and offers few rewards to diligent beetles. Bird droppings, with their high concentrations of uric acid, are savored only by a few ants and butterflies.” Of course, rotting fruit does just as well in this experiment.

  When we’ve rested, we drive to another fazenda to find Marty and the Los Angeles family. Climbing up again through dense foliage, we see Marty overhead, playing with two tawny babies. Tumbling all over him, clinging to his back, burbling, the kids look like they’re having fun, and Marty seems to be enjoying his new role as pater familias. An older female sits on a branch nearby, searching each twist of a palm leaf. She scampers to a broken tree and probes its crevices. One of the kids follows her. Reaching her arm up to the shoulder inside a branch knoll, she grabs something feisty and drags it right to the opening. The kid scurries up, and immediately she releases her grip. The kid reaches in with both hands and much effort, dragging out a cricket almost as big as he is. She must be hungry, but she sits quietly, like altruism incarnate, as her little brother devours the entire cricket, crunching loudly through its shell. Then she leaps to another branch, and little brother follows, climbing onto her back, as she joins Marty and the twins. The female buries her head in Marty’s chest, asking him to groom her, which he does. She sniffs his face, rubs against his body, makes soft, cheerful, trilling sounds. For an hour, we sit contentedly watching one tableau after another as they unconsciously act out all the scenes of a happy family playing, feeding, exploring the world together. Finally, we pack up to leave.

  Back at the van, we find Andrea and two men of the reintroduction team waiting with bad news. All hell has broken loose with the Columbia family. Jenny bit Maria viciously on the neck and drove her out of the nest box, thus restoring her authority and reclaiming the male. When Maria ran to the top of a hill, the family not only shunned her, they began leaving without her. So the reintroduction team captured the daughter and brought her to us.

  What to do? Ben strokes his forehead hard, as if he could erase what he just heard. We all were hoping the Columbia females would stop squabbling, make peace, and get on with family planning.

  “Well,” he says, “it was a good try. Now what will we do with the daughter?”

  Transferring Maria to our van, we head back to camp. How frightened she looks, sitting in one corner of her cage, occasionally making a long call, to which no other monkey replies. This has been a disturbing week of many journeys for her, and we’re not sure what her future will be. At the moment, there aren’t any families in need of a new mother. Should she be sent to the zoo in Rio? Kept in solitary at camp in case a position in a family opens up? Neither seems a good option.

  At camp, we clean out the Brookfield Zoo’s old cage and put Maria in it by herself. We are a sad lot, standing in the drizzle, wondering what to do for her. One by one, we drift back to the main house to wash up and get ready for dinner. An hour later, the deputy from a Brazilian conservation agency arrives with a GLT from a nearby town. The animal had been stolen as a two-month-old and was kept in a small cage in someone’s house for two years. Acting on a hot tip, the deputy went straight in and confiscated the monkey.

  Ben throws his hands to heaven and thanks God in Portuguese. Ziggy is a male of breeding age—perfect for Maria. Our prayers have been answered. We process Ziggy right away. He’s fat from being a pet for so long, and his calls are those of a baby. Unfortunately, he didn’t have the example of adults to emulate. But he looks healthy enough. Because of Ziggy, the camp’s mood brightens as cocktail hour begins. Out on the porch, Beate gives two of the Brazilians haircuts. Fernando sorts slides of trips he made to several of Brazil’s national parks. Joleen flirts hard with Luis, Zique, and P.C. At a large sink, Howie scrubs dirt from his clothing with a stiff brush and a bar of soap. Alfie crosses the porch doing a high, rapid finger snap. Ben rubs his back against a corner of the building to scratch, like a cart horse, with a huge, contented smile on his face.

  In the morning, the rooster crows thirty-four times in a row, pauses, phlegmily clears its throat, then continues crowing. In deep darkness, I stretch one leg over the side of the bed, sink slowly, and am relieved to feel a chair underfoot. Like a mole, I know my way blind to the kitchen, where a candle is already throwing shadows among the pots and pans hung on the walls. Alfie, the maestro of cafèzinho, has set water to boil; Ben is getting out canisters of dried milk and chocolate. “Bom dia,” we say groggily to one another. At the sound of the screen door opening, we turn and see Fernando standing in the doorway but not entering the room. His face looks troubled.

  “Your country is at war,” he says anxiously.

  With that news, the morning’s events move fast: telling the others, borrowing a shortwave radio, clustering around it and listening to the Voice of America. It seems impossible that we are at one of the ends of the earth and yet are receiving war-zone news that’s only thirty minutes old. Mainly, we all feel shell-shocked, helpless, and worried about our families. Although our adrenaline is pounding, there’s nowhere to focus it. The Brazilians are sympathetic, worried both about the Gulf War itself and about their economy, which is frightfully unstable. And what will happen to the last families of tamarins? If there’s a sentiment we all share, it’s the one Zique expresses when he says, “The whole world is maluca.”

  Camp work still must be done. It’s time to put Ziggy in with Maria, and we carry him down to her cage. Although he’s two years old, and therefore should be sexually mature, he hasn’t seen other tamarins before. Running right to the floor of the cage, he crawls on the wire and squeaks like a baby. Maria pokes her head out of her nest box and looks at this new teenager but doesn’t seem interested. Ziggy fusses with his radio collar, finally bending the antenna right in half. He talks baby talk, trips on the branches, and crawls on the floor. Maria studies him again, harder this time, then ignores him. He doesn’t sound like an adult male, or move like one, and he’s fat. Somehow he’s giving her all the wrong cues, and she may well be finding him the monkey equivalent of a nerd.

  “Oh, brother,” Beate sighs. If it isn’t one thing it’s another. “We were happy too soon about her.”

  “Well, it’s not over yet,” Ben says. “Maybe he’ll watch her awhile, she’ll watch him awhile … maybe … maybe …” His voice trails off.

  Some of the men set out on their morning rounds while we Americans cluster round the shortwave radio on the porch. As we listen to war news, Howie paces, and Ben obsessively sweeps the porch. We are all wearing war clothes—camouflage pants, desert boots, khaki shirts—and they feel too appropriate. In one sentence, we lament Ziggy’s behavior, in the next, Saddam Hussein’s. They weave together effortlessly. Life is struggle. Life includes all of this—the preservation of lower primates who cannot help them selves and the monstrous acts of higher ones who are equally, but differently, out of control. The world is maluca. The rain begins to fall in thick, lenslike drops, with a slow-motion quiver and only the faintest drumbeat. In a storm like this you can get drenched walking a few yards. How will Ziggy and Maria be faring, we wonder. Tamarins may live in the rain forest, but heavy rain disturbs them. Putting on our ponchos, we walk down to their cage.

  At first one of them seems to be missing. Has something happened to Ziggy? Maybe Maria is playing hard-to-get in the nest box. Then Ben starts to grin. It’s not one monkey we’re seeing but two. Ziggy and Maria are huddled together on a branch, arms wrapped tightly around each other. Fear of the storm, or chil
l, has sent them into each other’s arms. At nightfall, when we check again, they’ve disappeared into the nest box.

  “Another success story,” Ben says, as if it had been the simplest, most worry-free process on earth.

  Alfie, Howie, Ben, Beate, and I will be leaving tomorrow, but Joleen has decided to stay on in camp an extra week; she’s bought one of the “dental floss” bikinis popular on the beaches of Rio, and the Brazilian men have agreed to teach her the lambada. For Andrea, Fernando, Luis, and the rest of the reintroduction team, work will continue with all its usual excitement—the fazenda owners, the African-bee attacks, the poachers, the soap-opera-like family dramas of quarrels, truces, and hardships—despite world events. What will become of the Columbia family? I wonder. Of Ziggy and Maria? Of Marty and the kids? Will they find enough food and water? Will they learn to thrive in their strange new land full of savage and nourishing trees? It is as Charles Darwin once said of this region. “The land is one great wild, untidy hothouse, made by nature for herself.” The jungle is timeless, and the plight of the golden monkeys more and more urgent. Soon the newspapers are put away, the radios turned off. Thick arms of water embrace the hillsides. Despite the storm, the forest seems nearly silent. All the monkeys will be in their nests, huddled together and calm. There are no sounds of bird, mammal, or thunder—only the occasional crinkling of leaves. When the rain falls in the Mata Atlantica, it throws a blanket of quiet over everything.

  THE WINTER PALACE OF MONARCHS

  When I was little, growing up in a rural town in the heart of the country, I used to pursue monarch butterflies across yards and gardens. Like most children, I found them magical and otherworldly, a piece of the sun tumbling across the grass. I knew about both airplanes and birds—they made noises and skedaddled through the sky. And in my foolishness I thought flying insects held only menace. But there was something special about butterflies: they were safe, clean, colorful as Christmas wrap. They were delicate and silent and even a little acrobatic as they grazed on flowers. Fluttering madly—but moving slowly—from bloom to bloom, they looked the way my heart sometimes felt. Monarch was the first butterfly I knew by name. As I grew up, I discovered that this was true for most children. If the monarch was not a national symbol like the bald eagle, it was a powerful symbol nonetheless. Embodying nature at its most benign, it reminds us of the pageantry and innocence of childhood.

  Years later, I learned of the monarchs’ extraordinary migrations, and that sites where they spend the winters were vanishing to businesses, highways, and housing projects. The world would be a poorer place without butterflies. So I joined forces with Chris Nagano of the Los Angeles Museum’s Monarch Project, to help persuade California to pass legislation protecting the monarchs. In 1987 such a law was passed. There are many other conservation success stories—tougher problems to solve, bigger animals to protect, more complex obstacles than ignorance and greed to overcome. But it reassures me to know that a small animal, whose “usefulness” can’t be proven, can be saved through the determined efforts of a few people.

  Christmas in Southern California. In a eucalyptus grove near Santa Barbara, the bluish leaves have a talcy-white sheen that isn’t snow, and the towering trees are strung with gaudy lights. Long, thick garlands of orange and yellow sway among the branches. A warm coastal breeze puffs hard, and all at once the lights scatter, exploding in the sky like falling embers. Fire from the trees? When they rise again, my mouth opens in silent surprise. Butterflies! Thousands and thousands of butterflies.

  Some of the monarchs recluster in the trees, a Canaan they’ve traveled staggering distances to find. Others flutter to the open field beside the ocean, sip dew from the grass with hollow proboscises that unfurl from their mouths like party favors, or drink nectar from the frilly yellow eucalyptus flowers. They smear the field with orange, and when we walk through, they fly up all around us like a cloud of shiny coins. Only Bambi is missing from this fantasia of murmuring wings and unearthly calm. Trees, field, and sky are all drenched with butterflies. How did they get here?

  A hundred million monarchs migrate each year. Gliding, flapping, hitching rides on thermals like any hawk or eagle, they fly as far as four thousand miles and as high as two thousand feet, rivaling the great animal migrations of Africa, the flocking of birds across North America. Occasionally, one will be bamboozled by the jet stream and wind up in Mauritius or England. They need only water and nectar to thrive, but they are sensitive to cold and must spend the winter somewhere warm or die. So, in the fall, those west of the Rocky Mountains fly to the coast of California to cluster in select groves of eucalyptus and pine, while eastern monarchs migrate to Mexico. The routes aren’t learned—it’s straight genetics. The butterflies that leave the grove this spring are four or five generations removed from the ones that were here last year. They tend to choose the same, sometimes less than ideal sites, many of which are disappearing. This is why the International Union for the Conservation of Nature has listed the monarchs’ migrations as the world’s only “endangered phenomenon.”

  Each site in California is different, but together they make a single archipelago of roosts, a single winter address. One site is the elaborately landscaped front yard of an abandoned $3.5 million Santa Barbara beach house, rumbled past regularly by trains. One is a campsite in Big Sur, under the gaze of wild boars, coyotes, red-tailed hawks, whales, and wide-eyed schoolchildren. One is in back of a Pacific Grove motel, where every door is decorated with a large wooden butterfly. One is right on the highway in Pismo Beach, complete with a ranger who gives butterfly talks, and a kiosk with butterfly information and brochures. One is the front yard of a white stucco hacienda-type house in Hope Ranch, whose monarch-appreciative owner beams when they arrive, as if they were a visitation of orange angels. One is a wild, windswept outcropping at Morro Bay, where no self-respecting butterfly ought to be able to survive. One is tucked behind a Zen-inspired bridge near a small waterfall on the manicured estate of the Esalen Institute, where people go to find inner peace, self-awareness, and such experiences as the gestalt of singing, but no butterfly communing, no mapping of the monarchs’ auras. One site is a few miles from the Hearst Castle, right next to the oldest store on the Central Coast. Traffic whizzes by while, high up in the eucalyptus trees, butterflies mob, happy in their wintry hideout. When John Steinbeck, in Cannery Row, wrote about the clouds of butterflies grown drunk on the eucalyptus flowers, he was thinking of the roosts along the Monterey Peninsula, most of which are still there. At the Natural Bridges park in Santa Cruz the rangers have built a redwood platform to view the butterflies from, and each October there is a festival, featuring a balloon-and-cake party and a concert from the “5 M Band” (Mostly Mediocre Musical Monarch Mari posas). On Monarch Day, the mayor officially welcomes the butterflies to Santa Cruz, local poets read their works, and a person dubbed Monarch Man, dressed in orange and black and wearing dangling antennae, flies down a wire from a tree into the waiting crowd. He bursts through a paper hoop and hands out black-and-orange taffy. When the monarchs arrive, the rangers hoist a monarch flag on their monarch pole, and it flies for six months, until the last monarch leaves. It’s a festival jubilant as those our ancestors staged to welcome spring or the return of the antelope. In a typical season, sixty thousand visitors come to the Natural Bridges site. One day in December, though it was raining heavily, about forty thousand butterflies hung in clusters from the trees, and visitors kept arriving for an amazing eyeful.

  Pacific Grove boasts two sites and goes so far as to bill itself as Butterfly Town, U.S.A. Many of its businesses use the word “monarch” in their names and there is a parade each year with schoolchildren dressed in butterfly costumes. The town is serious about its winged visitors, which have brought in many binocular-slung tourists. There is a five-hundred-dollar fine for “molesting a butterfly in any way.” At the Butterfly Grove Inn, behind which stands one of the prime sites, a sign threatens butterfly molesters with a fifteen-hundred-dollar fin
e. That’s not official—in California, a fifteen-hundred-dollar fine applies to a felony, and going to prison for butterfly molesting would be rare, I imagine—but the five-hundred-dollar fine is legit. There are also signs cautioning people near the butterflies to whisper, not to spook them or yell at them. Butterflies don’t hear sound the way vertebrates do, but they do sense vibration. There are healthy roosts under the final approach path to the Santa Barbara Airport, beside a clanking highway, next to a railroad track, in the concussive racket of Big Sur’s waves. But in Pacific Grove, mum’s the word around clustering monarchs.

  Many sites have vanished under condominiums, business parks, avocado ranches, horse farms, golf courses, trailer parks, and other signs of progress. In the last few years, seven sites have been cut down, four of them around Santa Barbara. Butterfly Lane in Santa Barbara, next to Butterfly Beach, once boasted the most famous site in America, but now there are expensive homes instead, and “wing” means only an additional set of rooms.

  To the butterflies’ defense comes the privately funded Monarch Project. Its several scores of volunteers spend the winter visiting the roosts. They tag thousands of butterflies to track how fast and how far they fly (some travel up to eighty miles a day), where else they gather to roost, and how their populations may be changing. In November 1986, the project had a tag-off and set a world record, tagging 5,874 butterflies in one day. A 10 percent return is good; the project relies on people to find monarchs in their backyards and fields and return them to the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles, as requested on the tiny white tags the butterflies wear on their wings like badges of rank.