Four Wings and a Prayer

by Sue Halpern

  HOW DO PEOPLE KNOW what they know? This is always the question. The world presents itself: the sky is blue, the birds are singing. Our senses are an open window. A breeze is always blowing through. How do we know what cannot be proved? The answer is as unsatisfying as it is true: We just do. There are times when this is enough, and times when it is discomfiting. Recognition of a world that is not the familiar, material one is unsettling; it is hard enough to keep track of this world. Science, like belief, starts with wonder, and wonder starts with a question. As Bill Calvert would have told the students, answers did not dispel the wonder, they reinforced it. Answers begot questions, and questions were the libido of intelligence. How better to describe the endless pursuit of knowledge than passion?

  THE QUESTION AT Monarch Camp the next day was how to test whether or not magnetism was a factor in monarch butterfly orientation. It was two-thirty in the afternoon, eighty-six degrees, with a slow wind boiling up out of the east. The students and teachers sat at picnic tables, pencils in hand as Liz Goehring and Sonia Altizer delivered a crash course in how to ask questions that could be answered by science.

  “We’re all brand new at studying orientation,” Liz said, “so let’s set up an experiment to figure out the effect of geomagnetism on the butterflies. What would be a good question to frame this investigation?”

  “ ‘Will a strong magnetic pulse affect orientation?’ “ someone asked.

  “Good,” said Goehring. “That will work. We’ve got two kinds of monarchs—ones that have been raised in a greenhouse and wild ones—and we are going to expose only some of them to a magnetic pulse to confuse their polarity, so we’ll have a control group. Can you think of a second question we should be looking at?”

  “ ‘Will wild monarchs respond differently to being pulsed than ones raised in a greenhouse?’ “ a girl with a honeyed Texas accent asked.

  Liz nodded her head yes. She wrote down the question. “So what do you expect will happen?”

  The students raised their hands. “The wild ones that haven’t been pulsed will fly to the southwest,” one of them said.

  “What about the other group?”

  The participants weren’t sure, so they settled on a random distribution: those butterflies might go anywhere.

  “Let’s find out,” Liz said eagerly, directing everyone across the dirt road to an open field. Sonia was there already, surreptitiously exposing butterflies to a magnet so no one would know which monarchs were which. Launchpads (aka kitchen sponges) were distributed, and binoculars and compasses, too. Log sheets were drawn. The group arrayed itself across the field in pairs, and each pair was handed a butterfly in an envelope. They all studied their specimens and began recording information in their logs. Julia Goldberg, an eighth-grader from Rochester, Minnesota, took her first butterfly, knelt down behind it, and placed it on the sponge, which was facing east.

  “Here goes,” she said, letting loose its wings, which she had pinched together between her thumb and forefinger. She stepped back, expecting the monarch to rise up and make haste for the sky. But then a funny thing happened: the butterfly did not budge. It just sat on the sponge, casually—almost coquettishly—flapping its wings. A minute later it hopped off the sponge and pitched over into the grass. It looked drunk.

  Julia released another butterfly and then another—eleven in all. Some took off immediately, heading south-southwest, a few lolled in the grass, and a couple more hung around the launchpad for a few minutes, then lifted off and aimed for the nearest tree. The same thing was happening all over the field. Maybe a dozen butterflies were scattered in the grass, and a bunch more were in the trees. As they sunned themselves, the data began to accumulate and a pattern began to emerge. It was like connect-the-dots before the last few numbers were reached: a picture was lurking there.

  “Butterfly AA—what kind do you guess it is?” Liz asked Julia, as the butterfly made no effort to move from its grassy perch.

  “Wild, pulsed,” she said confidently.

  Liz checked her own data sheet and looked up in amazement. “Yes!” she said. “What about butterfly C?”

  Julia consulted her log. “Lab-raised, no pulse,” she ventured.

  “Yes!” Liz said. “So what’s the pattern?”

  The eighth-grade science student looked over her notes. The pulsed butterflies didn’t go anywhere, she explained; they just hung out in the grass. The unpulsed lab-raised monarchs didn’t go far at first either, but then, after warming themselves in the sun for a few minutes and shaking off the chill of the cooler in which they’d been kept, they flew off in no particular direction. In contrast, the unpulsed wild butterflies took off right away, heading southwest. Liz was excited. Julia was excited. Her guesses were right. She was as giddy as a stock picker whose system was working. If she was ever going to get hooked on science, this was the moment.

  A look of concern, a small one, crossed Liz’s face. “It doesn’t always work out this neatly,” she cautioned. Julia and the other members of the group nodded responsibly. But then Liz was smiling again. The fact was, it had worked out. Who could say it wouldn’t again? The kids and teachers gave one another high-fives.

  NEAT AS THE experiment had been, a problem began to nag at me. By then the students were on to other things, though the glow of success still hung over them. But the question for me was, what did it mean that butterflies exposed to a magnetic pulse fell headlong into the grass? Not, certainly, that monarch butterflies used magnetism to orient themselves in flight. No experiment had yet been designed to prove that. All the experiment seemed to demonstrate was that monarchs had magnetite in their bodies that responded to a magnetic charge. But that was already well known. Interfering with a function did not prove that that function, when intact, was essential. Drinking alcohol would impair my ability to drive, for instance, but not drinking alcohol was not what enabled me to drive carefully (or not) at other times.

  That night I put my question to Bill Calvert, who was patiently gluing dead monarchs onto a strip of cardboard. “You’re probably right,” he said, shrugging. “But it was pretty great, wasn’t it?”

  Knowledge can be passed along from person to person like a baton in a race, but the pursuit of knowledge, and love for the pursuit of knowledge, that particular passion, can only be chosen. This, I think, was what Bill Calvert was hinting at, or what I wanted him to mean.

  THERE WERE MONARCHS migrating through at Selah, but not many, not enough, and not in the kinds of numbers that might make an impression. So the campers were loaded into vans and Bill Calvert got into his truck. He knew a place a few hours away, a reliable roost at Garner State Park. It would be an overnight field trip.

  Sandra Perez had arrived that afternoon on her way to a meeting farther south, so she came along, too. Her Georgia experiment was finished, the monarch season was nearly over, and neither had gone exactly the way anyone might have predicted. Soon Perez would have to get on with her real work, her postdoc on ants. If there was going to be a valedictory to this elusive generation of monarchs, this would be the last chance.

  It was a long drive into the heart of the hill country, through Twin Sisters and Comfort, along the Guadalupe River and under the junipers in its fertile valley. It was nearly dark when the group arrived at Garner State Park, and Calvert hustled everyone into the woods. In the quickening night, students and teachers gathered around him—first a ring of students, then a ring of teachers. The question of the moment had to do with roost formation, Bill explained. Monarchs roosted in groups. Were they attracted to big clusters, to small clusters, or to no clusters at all? He held up one of the strips of dead monarchs he had been assembling the night before. A dozen open-winged butterflies were crowded together on it, back to front, like moviegoers queued on opening night.

  “We’ll use these as decoys,” Bill said, showing how to attach a strip to a tree branch so it hung along the bias in the right direction. “We’re going to observe whether, when the monarchs see the cluste
rs, they’ll try to join the roost.”

  For the tree climbers among the group it was an opportune time to show off. Up they went, shimmying out on the limbs of live oaks to fasten the decoys onto the leaves. For those who couldn’t climb, the decoys were placed at arm’s height on pecan trees—a design flaw, no doubt, since monarchs were not likely to roost so low. But that was beside the point. Fifteen minutes passed, then twenty-five. The occasional monarch fell through the canopy and flew about, but most of those that did just left again, and none made even a wink at the decoy clusters. The experiment was canceled on account of the fact that the visiting team did not show up. Nor did the home team, for that matter.

  “From the reports I was getting, I would have guessed that there were gobs and gobs of monarchs here recently,” Bill Calvert said apologetically. “We must be in the trough of the wave. It’s too bad, but it’s nature.”

  “LET’S GET OUT of here and go to Del Rio,” I said to Sandra Perez then, though it was after nine and Del Rio, the Texas town on the Mexican border through which millions of monarchs regularly passed on their way to the other side, was at least four hours away. As a child I had often read the last page of a book when I was in the thick of it, and even when I hadn’t, that last page had still been there to be resisted or given in to. Del Rio was the final page of this year’s volume on monarchs, and though it wouldn’t conclude anything, really, I suddenly needed to get there.

  We drove through the night trying to outdistance the butterflies, somewhere acquiring a bottle of scotch and a block of cheese and a cheap motel room containing a mismatched set of dinner plates. I had seen butterflies before. I had seen gobs and gobs of butterflies before, but for me this trip to the border was like skipping to the end of the book. It had been months since the monarchs had left Mexico, and I just wanted to know one thing: Were they here? Were the butterflies I hadn’t seen in the Adirondacks and at Cape May and in Toronto and Lawrence up in the sky? It wouldn’t mean anything if they were or if they weren’t, not in a scientific way, but it would mean something to me. I had been watching monarchs for years. Their story was part of mine, and I wanted to know, as if knowledge were a promise, not a set of facts.

  IN THE MORNING we continued on for another forty-five miles, to Seminole Canyon, a limestone basin out on Route 90. It was raining lightly, and the sky was overcast, and the wind was blowing from the southeast—not ideal conditions for a monarch butterfly.

  “Last year there were millions here in the tree by the ranger’s station,” a man in a camper told us when we asked if he’d seen any butterflies. “This year they’ve just been filtering through the canyon, out of the wind.” He directed us to get back in the car and drive down to where the Pecos River met the Rio Grande.

  The rain was played out. We drove in silence, down a steep hill to a dry riverbed where sheer rock walls rose up from the ground like battlements. It was quiet down there. The grasses had grown high but couldn’t quite cover the rusted cans and yellowed plastic bottles that littered the ground. Nature had reasserted itself, but not enough. We stepped over an abandoned boat launch and followed a path down to the bottom. There was no wind. Not a lick. No one was around. It was better that way.

  We climbed back up and sat on a stone jetty. I handed my binoculars to Sandra, who leaned back and lifted them to her eyes. The last page was upon us, and I wanted her to tell me what was written there. Without a word she handed the glasses back to me. The sky was steel gray. Mexico was a short swim away. Air was a fluid. I took a look, and then another, and settled in to look some more. There they were, the monarchs, a steady stream of them, twenty-three, forty-four, one hundred and nine, and then I lost count.

  NOTE ON RESOURCES

  Of the many books and articles I have read about monarch butterfly migration, the first, Fred Urquhart’s The Monarch Butterfly: International Traveler (William Caxton, Ltd.), remains one of the most interesting from a historical perspective, in chronicling the Urquharts’ early efforts to understand monarch migration. A more comprehensive history of the quest to track these butterflies, as well as an introduction to the naturalists whose quest it has been, may be found in Lincoln P. Brower’s definitive essay “Understanding and Misunderstanding the Migration of the Monarch Butterfly in North America, 1857–1994,” in the Journal of the Lepidopterists’ Society, no. 49 (1995). Although they are too numerous to list here, Brower’s scientific writings, which touch on almost every aspect of monarch biology and behavior, are essential reading for anyone hoping to gain more than a superficial understanding of Danaus plexippus. For example, his early collaborations with Jane Brower, published in Ecology, no. 43 (1962), and the Journal of the Lepidopterists’ Society, no. 15 (1961), among others, provide useful background on mimicry and are resonant with his later articles written with Linda Fink (Nature, no. 291 [1981]) and J. N. Seiber et al. (Journal of Chemical Ecology, nos. 10 [1984] and 8 [1981]), on cardenolides. Lincoln Brower’s work with William Calvert (in the Journal of the Lepidopterists’ Society, nos. 46 [1992], 43 [1989], and 40 [1986]; Biotropica, no. 15 [1983]; and Science, no. 204 [1979], to name just a few) opens wide a window on the Mexican overwintering sites and the dangers faced by monarch butterflies there.

  The two large and exhaustive volumes on biology, sociology, and conservation that have come out of the three international symposia on monarch butterflies held in 1981, 1986, and 1997 are crucial from both scientific and historical standpoints. These are Biology and Conservation of the Monarch Butterfly, edited by Stephen Malcolm and Myron Zalucki (Science Series no. 38, Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County), and the Proceedings of the 1997 North American Conference on the Monarch Butterfly, edited by Jurgen Hoth, Leticia Merino, Karen Oberhauser et al. (Commission for Environmental Cooperation, Montreal, Canada). A more accessible (and beautifully illustrated) introduction to monarchs is Eric Grace’s The World of the Monarch Butterfly (Sierra Club Books); also recommended is Kathryn Lasky’s children’s book Monarchs (Gulliver Books).

  In the midst of all this prose, I have taken solace in Alison Hawthorne Deming’s The Monarchs: A Poem Sequence (Louisiana State University Press) and in the work of the esteemed Mexican poet Homero Aridjis, whose collection Exaltation of Light is available in English. While the poetry of Aridjis’s good friend W. S. Merwin provided many wonderful literary diversions, his essay on monarch butterflies in Orion magazine (Winter 1996) was critical to this project.

  In many ways my interest in monarchs was piqued by a number of magnificent books about birds. These included Kenn Kaufman’s Kingbird Highway: The Story of a Natural Obsession That Got Out of Hand (Houghton Mifflin), Jonathan Weiner’s The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time (Vintage Books), Christopher Cokinos’s Hope Is the Thing with Feathers: A Personal Chronicle of Vanishing Birds (Jeremy Tarcher), Paul Kerlinger’s How Birds Migrate (Stackpole Books), and Scott Weidensaul’s Living on the Wind: Across the Hemisphere with Migratory Birds (North Point Press). Werner Nachtigall’s entomological study Insects in Flight also nudged my increasing preoccupation with both aviation and butterflies, as did the work of Gary Paul Nabhan, especially The Forgotten Pollinators (with Stephen Buchmann, Island Press) and Sue Hubbell’s Broadsides from the Other Orders: A Book of Bugs (Houghton Mifflin).

  Three field guides proved invaluable: The Audubon Society Handbook for Butterfly Watchers (Scribner’s), by Robert Michael Pyle; the same author’s Audubon Field Guide to North American Butterflies (Knopf); and Jeffrey Glassberg’s Butterflies through Binoculars (Oxford). The work of Professor Adrian Wenner on monarchs, honeybees, and epistemology offered a necessary and provocative challenge to the “truth” of monarch research in particular and of science in general. Particularly helpful were his book Anatomy of a Controversy: The Question of a “Language” among Bees (with Patrick Wells; Columbia University Press) and a number of as-yet-unpublished responses to the orientation experiments by Sandra Perez and Chip Taylor described in their paper “The Sun Compass in Monarch
Butterflies” (Nature, no. 387, [1997]). Wenner’s studies of California monarchs supplied a useful perspective on the West Coast population, as did Monarch News, a monthly newsletter published by California Monarch Studies, a not-for-profit organization run by the avid and prolific San Diego lepidopterist David Marriott. By far the most intimate and insightful understanding of western monarch behavior, and of the quaint and obsessive behavior of one of our great entomologists, is to be found in Robert Michael Pyle’s personal epic Chasing Monarchs: A Migration with the Butterflies of Passage (Houghton Mifflin). Even farther west, University of Hawaii professor John Stimson’s pioneering research on white monarchs introduced me to genetic mutation, polymorphism, and the role of predation in biological diversity.

  Resources available on the Internet have been essential to this project and will, I wager, play an increasing role in the collection and dissemination of knowledge about monarchs. The University of Kansas’s Monarch Watch Web site (www.monarchwatch.org) and its e-mail discussion group, D-Plex, as well as the organization’s newsletter, are the crossroads for almost all monarch enthusiasts, whether professional or amateur. Monarch Watch, along with Journey North (www.learner.org/jnorth), not only track the movement of monarchs but also archive vital scientific papers and historical data. Both sites were of inestimable value to me.

  I also relied on the systematic longitudinal data on the eastern coastal migration collected by Dick Walton’s Monarch Monitoring Project, formerly called the Monarch Migration Association of North America (www.concord.org/~dick/mon.html), and on the comprehensive account of flying and gliding, wind and weather, provided on David Gibo’s “Tactics and Vectors” Web site (www.erin.utoronto.ca/~w3gibo), which also shares data on monarch movements and corollary meteorological conditions relayed by pilots. For information on the effect of genetically altered corn pollen on monarch larvae, I consulted the Website run by the University of Iowa’s entomology department (www.ent.iastate.edu). The eponymous “butterflywebsite” (www.butterflywebsite.com), which is run by commercial breeders, not only offered insight into the controversial world of butterfly farming, it supplied an extensive list of butterfly houses around the world, online reference material about butterflies and moths, and links to international entomological organizations. Finally, the University of Minnesota’s Monarch Lab (www.monarchlab.umn.edu) provided curricular information, archival data, experimental data, and, perhaps most important, links to the ever-expanding universe of monarch biology.