Four Wings and a Prayer

by Sue Halpern

  It was the Big Right Turn theory again, a conclusion the data merely hinted at. David Gibo had gone in search of its coordinates in his ultralight airplane and failed to find them. Chip Taylor had distributed hundreds of thousands of Monarch Watch tags, but none had ever shown up in Mexico from any southeastern state. Now he was on to something else. Or rather, his colleague Sandra Perez was. The year before she had taken Kansas butterflies to Washington, D.C., and Dalton, Georgia, and released them to see which way they went; all had behaved as if they were in Kansas, flying southwesterly. Now she was going back to repeat the experiment, but with a difference: this time she was going to cage the monarchs in situ for a few days, on the theory that they might need a little time in their new neighborhoods to figure out how to read the local cues.

  “I still expect them to behave the way they would if they were in Kansas and go southwest, but Chip expects them to adjust for their new orientation and fly more westerly,” Perez said. More westerly would suggest the Big Right Turn.

  As she talked, Perez took a quick inventory of the materials arrayed on the table in the biology annex, located on West Campus, in a trailer she shared with a postdoc who studied crickets: plastic hangers, toothbrush holders, duct tape, pieces of wood. Perez was making artificial nectar feeders for the butterflies she planned to keep in captivity. For as long as they were with her, they’d be treated to a cocktail of Gatorade and protein, served from a soaked, colored kitchen sponge. The feeders held the sponges.

  “What I love about field biology is that I can get all my equipment at Wal-Mart,” Perez said, bridging two hangers with a piece of wood that she then secured with a length of duct tape. That done, she taped the top of a toothbrush holder onto the wood. This would cradle the sponge.

  “When the migrants come through I collect several hundred at a time,” she said, tearing strips of tape and hanging them off the side of the table. “This many feeders is probably excessive, but I don’t want anyone to be hungry in there.” She motioned for me to start taping the wood to a hanger. Production swung into high gear.

  “I’m sure one of the biological supply houses sells something like this premade,” she said after a while, “but this is a lot cheaper. And a lot more fun.”

  BUT IF THE HANGERS, the toothbrush holders, the sponges, and even the tents where the captives would be housed could be bought at Wal-Mart, Perez was still missing the one thing she could not buy there: butterflies. Specifically, nonreproductive migrating butterflies. Migrants were as scarce in Lawrence that fall as they were in the Adirondacks and Toronto and Cape May. The Baker Wetlands, not far from the university campus, a reliable roost for migrating monarchs in years past, was now as empty as a condemned building. We saw just twenty of them in a quarter-mile stretch on which on an average day the year before we would have seen ten thousand. That order of magnitude could not be explained away. “They’ve never been this late before,” Chip Taylor said of the monarchs. But he couldn’t say where exactly they were, or where they’d be coming from.

  He had a hunch, though. When you needed migrating monarchs in Kansas, there was one sure place to go: Wamego. There was a high school biology teacher there, Terry Callender, whose students had tagged more monarch butterflies than any other group. One year, twenty or so kids had captured, measured, weighed, tagged, and released an unprecedented twelve thousand monarchs. They’d had a lot of recoveries, too. Terry’s classroom, Chip said, represented the best of what Monarch Watch had to offer students. If they had monarchs there, he was sure they would share. Sandra and I consulted a map. Wamego looked to be about two hours away, between Topeka and Manhattan, on Highway 24. We gathered nets, extension poles, envelopes, and high-beam flashlights. The high beams were key, Sandra explained, since we’d be jacklighting the butterflies.

  “Isn’t that poaching?” I wondered aloud.

  Sandra looked at me with amusement. “This is science,” she said, laughing.

  TERRY CALLENDER, an affable, bearish man with a neatly trimmed beard and gray hair, waved us into his classroom in the basement of Wamego High. It was the end of the day, and students were gathered by his desk waiting to sign out butterfly nets while Callender, wearing a faded Monarch Watch T-shirt, teased them.

  “If you want to get out of science process class on Friday, bring in a thousand monarchs and we’ll have too much to do to do anything else,” he told them. They nodded earnestly.

  Terry turned to us. “We usually do five or six hundred per class. They get really efficient, especially if we shut down the class. Sometimes a single student will bring in five hundred or even a thousand butterflies. For some reason we always get a lot of monarchs here. It can get really wild. Two years ago we had eight hundred we had to feed because it was too cold for them to fly. Sometimes we get so many butterflies that I don’t teach the entire day and we just tag the whole time. It’s like a factory. When school started this fall the kids came in and said, ‘When do we get to tag?’ I’d never heard that before. They are really into it.”

  On the wall over the sink in Terry’s classroom was this message: “I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.” One look around and it was obvious that nothing could better describe his educational philosophy. In a run-of-the-mill school in a rural midwestern backwater, Callender was pioneering the kind of hands-on, experiential learning favored by progressive educational reformers in more sophisticated places. There were waders piled up in one corner so kids could explore the creeks that ran to the Kansas River, which flowed alongside the town, and piles of butterfly nets, and rows of microscopes, and a freshwater aquarium. A paper wasps’ nest hung from the ceiling, and there were animal skulls and duck decoys. Terry Callender was a hunter, and it showed—not just in the veritable museum of taxidermy that also crowded the walls of his classroom, but in the patient, observant, expectant attitude he brought to the study of wild things.

  “Divide yourselves into groups of threes and fours,” he told the students when they had returned to their seats. “I’ll be right back.” And he was, carrying a box of envelopes he had just taken out of the refrigerator.

  “OK. You are going to put a tag on each butterfly and write down its number in the log. Then you are going to write down whether it is male or female. How do you tell the difference?”

  “Something about the veins,” one boy offered.

  “Well, yes, there is something to that,” the teacher said, “since the veins tend to be thicker on the females than on the males. But there’s something else. Look at my shirt.” The kids stared at his shirt, which meant staring at his substantial middle, which made a couple of them giggle.

  “That one,” a girl with long blond hair and braces said, pointing to one of the butterflies. “It’s a male.”

  Terry Callender beamed. “Right,” he said. “See the dot? It’s the pheromone sac. There’s some controversy about whether it’s functional or not, but only the males have them. Right. OK. When you’re doing the log, I need you to write down wind speed—it’s calm today; temperature—it’s in the mid eighties; and the wing condition on a scale of one to four, where one is fresh and four is almost transparent because the scales have fallen off. When you’re done, call for a runner—I need volunteers—and give your monarch to them and they’ll go outside and release the butterfly.”

  The students broke into groups, girls with girls, boys with boys, and before long the room was percussive. It’s a one. Male. I think it’s a two. Male. Female. Two. No, one. Runner, we need a runner. Female. Female. Two. Runner. The bell rang. A few kids with buses to catch took off. A bunch of others stayed. It was last period. The halls were filled with students eager to leave the building. Callender’s students remained in their seats, sexing the butterflies. “They just can’t seem to get enough of this,” he said.

  That Terry Callender’s students even had any monarchs to tag was evidence, he said, of their interest in the project. In past years the butterflies had been plentiful in Wamego�
��he recalled sending his own six-year-old into the front yard with a net, and the boy’s returning a few minutes later with over a hundred monarchs—but this year they were scarce, coming in sporadically, not hanging around.

  “This is the first time in four years that they haven’t been here on the tenth of September in big, big numbers,” he said. “Four years isn’t a long time, but still, I think we were seeing a trend.” We made plans to meet up again later, after the sun went down, in the city park.

  WHERE I CAME FROM, jacklighting was the lazy way to bag a deer. Guys would troll the back roads in their pickups, shining bright lights into the edge of the forest, hoping to catch the reflection of a buck’s eyes. The light would pin him there, and the guys wouldn’t even have to get out of their truck. They’d just rest the rifle on the window ledge and shoot.

  Jacklighting monarchs, Sandra Perez assured me, was nothing like that. For one thing it wasn’t illegal. For another, it wasn’t the light that paralyzed them; it was the temperature. They were already unable to move before the light was shined on them. This, it seemed to me, was a debater’s point.

  “We’re going to shine the light under the branches and look for roosts,” she said, ignoring my objections. “Sometimes they’re hard to see. You have to be careful not to miss them because they blend in so well.”

  “It doesn’t look good,” Terry Callender said when we met up with him in the park. It was nine o’clock, and the reason he thought it did not look good was that his students had been out on the streets of Wamego for an hour and a half; he was pretty sure the town was already picked over. But then we walked a little farther into the park and Sandra shined a light on the underside of a silver maple and there, as if she were projecting it, was a small cluster of monarchs, crowding the branch like rush-hour straphangers on the Broadway Local.

  “We’ll snag them later,” Terry said, hustling us out of the park and down a pleasant residential street of small houses with big porches. “We need to get to Mrs. Bradford’s yard before the kids do. There are always monarchs there. Why that yard? Why those trees? There is no apparent reason. We tried to determine if they prefer one kind of tree to another, but they don’t seem to.”

  We walked briskly, the sound of our footfalls seeming to precede us. There was no traffic; the streets were quiet, the houses welcoming. Muslin curtains, yellow light, roofs overhung by old, old trees.

  Mrs. Bradford’s trees looked like all the others. We inspected the one out front, then walked around to the back of the house. Terry Callender waved to Mrs. Bradford, who was on the phone inside. She hung up and came out just as Sandra was demonstrating her net-swiping technique. It was very smooth. Thirty monarchs tumbled into her clutches.

  “Nice,” Terry Callender said.

  Some of his students appeared just then, walking out of the shadows as if they’d been summoned by an inaudible buzzer.

  “What did you get?” they wanted to know—meaning “how many?”

  “They’re keeping score,” Sandra whispered.

  “Where have you been?” their teacher asked them. A few of them hedged; one said the city park; all of them began to drift away.

  “It gets pretty competitive,” Terry explained. “They won’t even tell me where the best roosts are.”

  BACK IN THE CITY PARK at around ten, Callender’s students kneeled on the grass comparing their hauls.

  “I only got a hundred and fifty,” said a skinny freshman boy wearing a Kansas State windbreaker.

  “A hundred and ten,” said a junior girl in a University of Kansas sweatshirt.

  Terry shook his head. “Sorry we couldn’t do better for you, ladies,” he apologized to us. Then he spoke to his students: “OK, kids, how about handing over your envelopes to Dr. Perez?” They looked at him with a mixture of astonishment and betrayal. Hand over their butterflies? What was he thinking?

  He tried again. “She needs them for an experiment she’s doing. In Georgia.”

  Even so—give away their butterflies?

  Reluctantly, they did.

  THE EXPERIMENT almost worked. Perez sent collapsible tents and eighty butterflies packed on ice to a friend in the Washington, D.C., area, three days ahead of her own arrival. When she got there she was carrying an additional eighty monarchs. The next day she released them all and recorded which way they went. It wasn’t a blind study—she knew which group was which, a factor that might have influenced the results—but the acclimatized ones did shift their orientation a little to the west, heading inland. It was a small shift, but statistically significant enough to warrant Perez’s handing over a bottle of Dos Equis to Chip Taylor.

  Georgia was a different matter altogether. Hurricane George was moving up the coast and Perez wasn’t sure there would be enough time to acclimate the butterflies before the wind and rain began. So this time she brought both groups of monarchs with her, releasing the wild Kansas butterflies first, then waiting a few days before releasing the second set. The Kansas butterflies flew southwest. The others tended to the west, but only very slightly. It was inconclusive. When she did the distributions, Perez noticed something else, too. About half of the second group of butterflies were doing something totally unpredicted. They were heading southeast, toward the ocean. To Sandra Perez this meant only one thing: she’d have to go back the next year and do the experiment again.

  A DAY AWAY from Washington, D.C., as the monarch flies, in the Blue Ridge Mountains, Lincoln Brower was brooding. It was the end of the third week of September 1998, and no rain had fallen for nearly a month. He was standing at the Greenstone Overlook, at three thousand feet, looking down into the Shenandoah Valley. “Not one monarch,” he said, shaking his head. “Nothing. Amazing.” He got back into his car and continued on the Blue Ridge Parkway, then cut over to Skyline Drive, conducting an informal inventory. Loft Mountain, Big Run, Rockytop Ridge, Patterson Ridge—no monarchs. “Populations normally fluctuate tenfold,” he said, driving down from Rocky Mountain. “If you had a hundred and fifty per man hour last year, fifteen would be low but within an accepted range. This year it’s more like one point five.”

  Brower got out of the car and scanned the sky with his binoculars. In the three hours he had been driving around he had seen not a single monarch. “I don’t know when it becomes meaningful that it’s a bad year,” he said.

  Chapter 10

  BILL CALVERT EASED his truck off Interstate 281 near Johnson City, Texas, and headed out of town toward a spot on the map that appeared to be blank. Half an hour later he crossed over a cattle grate and under a sign that said Selah Ranch and proceeded along the scrub, past the live oaks, up to the main house. It was a few weeks shy of a year since our trip to Morelia. The same cassette tapes were sitting on the dashboard of his truck, waiting to be played. The same coverless, well-thumbed paperback Random House Dictionary was tucked under the seat. The same truck, nineteen thousand miles later. The nets, the roll of duct tape, the extension poles, the digital scale were all in the truckbed. Even the clothes Bill Calvert had on were the same. The changes had occurred elsewhere, away from the migratory part of his life, which remained constant.

  It had been a bad year for monarchs, but not for Bill Calvert. He had his study site, his trips to Mexico; he had data to collate, papers to write. The ebb and flow of butterfly populations were background noise, at least so far. He had heard them before. It was enough to do the work.

  Selah, where Calvert arrived at midafternoon, was a five-thousand-acre environmental education center in the Texas hill country. When Bill Calvert drove into the parking lot, he was greeted by Karen Oberhauser, Liz Goehring, and Sonia Altizer of the University of Minnesota. For the next six days they would be colleagues at what Calvert was calling Monarch Camp. It was Karen Oberhauser’s show, really, part of her Minnesota-based Monarch Monitoring Project. The idea was to teach teachers and students together how to do science. Oberhauser, a Harvard graduate who’d been a schoolteacher before getting her doctorate, understood
that for the most part teachers did not like to teach science. It scared them. The best way to demystify it, she thought, was to have them do it. The members of the group had already gotten together once, in Minnesota, and since then had been working on research projects. They would be continuing these at Selah and seeing the migration, too.

  “In Minnesota we focused on breeding ecology and behavior,” Oberhauser reminded the group. In shorts, sneakers, and a T-shirt, she looked the part of head counselor; the hand lens she was wearing on a lanyard around her neck could have been a whistle. “This week we’re going to focus on migration, the nonbreeding part of the life cycle.” She handed over the proceedings to Bill Calvert, introducing him as, among other things, the man who had found the Mexican overwintering sites. The young people, eager always to be touched by celebrity, sat up and took notice.

  Calvert described a Texas flyway, three hundred miles wide from Wichita Falls to Eagle Pass, and talked about fall migration patterns and the spring remigration, about fire-ant predation, about how monarchs rode the updrafts along the spine of the Sierra Madre Oriental. The students listened politely, but what they wanted to know about more than anything was Calvert’s initial discovery of the overwintering sites.

  “The local people in Mexico thought the monarchs were coming there to die,” he said. “They also thought the migrants were the souls of dead children. They usually began to arrive on November second, All Souls’ Day.” His audience laughed nervously. Butterflies were … butterflies. How could they be something—someone—else? But the students had been learning to do science using the null hypothesis, so they knew that the question could also be asked like this: How could the butterflies not be something—someone—else?