To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow.
Audrey Hepburn
On a late-August day in 2018 I was sitting on a bench in the University of Wisconsin’s butterfly-friendly arboretum in Madison. The weather was picture-book perfect. Temperature a fine, dry, obliging 73 degrees. Sky crystal clear. Visibility seemingly infinite. Primates were born for such days.
The slightest of breezes wafted through the waxy leaves of the bur oaks scattered around me. The birds were out for a little late lunch. The bees were busy storing honey and the sounds of crickets noted the shortening days. Contentment. As I jotted down thoughts, Lepidoptera drifted by in the afternoon sun. Swallowtail butterflies with just a hint of luminous structural blue on their wings enjoyed the purple blooms of a tall thistle. Monarchs fluttered everywhere, absorbing nutrition through their proboscises to store in their abdomens, preparing for their long journey south. They were already joining up with each other, socializing and roosting, waiting for just the right winds to send them south to Mexico.
I felt like I was in the middle of a 1930s Disney animation, complete with whistling birds and silly music: Walt Whitman’s “butterfly good-time.” Listening to the rustling sounds of tall grasses, enjoying a sun that was hot but not too hot, I couldn’t think of a thing to complain about. Very odd for me. I thought about worrying about what was wrong with me for not feeling worried, but then decided not to bother even with that. “Let’s go get drunk on light,” post-Impressionist Georges Seurat once wrote. I knew exactly what he’d meant. I’d pigged out on so much sunshine that I could barely move. I’d rolled a Lucky Seven.
Unfortunately for the fair city of Madison, just one day earlier Kane County had been drowned in a deluge that would have impressed even Noah. The storms pounded the land with as much as eighteen inches of rain in one twenty-four-hour period. Sadly, one poor fellow had been washed away by an unexpectedly strong current.
The city’s infrastructure couldn’t keep up. A woman in an airport line told me her family had had to evacuate their home, not because of the water itself—but because Madison’s sewers were flowing backward. Sewage was bubbling up into her basement.
Courtesy of global weather changes, rising lake levels had inundated the isthmus on which Madison is built. Yet another storm would arrive tomorrow. Fortunately, I would be on a flight out very early the next morning. I would be the rat abandoning the ship.
I had come to meet the arboretum’s new director, Karen Oberhauser, the U.S. grand dame of monarch research and creator of influential classroom education projects on monarchs. Oberhauser had just left her longtime position heading up the Monarch Lab at the University of Minnesota. A protégée of Lincoln Brower, she has been involved with monarch research for most of her career and sits on the board of Monarch Joint Venture, a collaborative group of scientists working to improve monarch numbers. Because of her dedication, the Obama White House named Oberhauser a “Champion of Change.”
It’s not surprising, then, that she had arrived here, in this nearly century-old institution, as a change agent. The Madison arboretum, founded to be a showcase for Wisconsin’s various ecosystems, had not previously emphasized monarch conservation. But after only a few months under Oberhauser’s directorship, it was already obvious that this would change. The arboretum had just become the nation’s first such facility to join the Joint Venture program. The visitor center had plenty of information on butterfly conservation, and all you had to do was step out the door to see plenty of monarchs in action, fueling their abdomens with nectar for the journey south. Soon other monarch-oriented professionals would join Oberhauser.
During our visit, we walked over several parts of the 1,200-acre conservation and research property, observing the plants and noting the sometimes severe damage resulting from the unprecedented torrents. We looked at a section of roadway that bordered one of the arboretum’s small ponds. “Used to border” would be a more accurate statement. A large chunk of road was now gone. As the rains continued through that season, even more chunks would disappear.
Oberhauser was worried about the effect of all this water on the arboretum. And yet, not despite but because of these deluges that had pummeled large parts of the Midwest and East Coast, it was already obvious that the 2018 monarch migration was going to be the best it had been in many years. At least in the Midwest, the climate anomalies had been good for plants. Growth was spectacular. This meant more flowers for nectaring, which meant better-fed insects, which meant more productive butterfly matings, which meant more caterpillars… .
It also meant that there would be better stopover habitat for monarchs heading south. Of North America’s three major flyways—western, eastern, and central—the most significant is the central flyway. From north of the Canadian border, from as far west as the eastern front of the Rockies several thousand miles east to the Appalachians, the central migration route resembles a colossal oil funnel that encompasses roughly two-thirds of the continent.
When it’s time for the migration to begin, first in twos and threes and then in tens and twenties, and ultimately in the thousands, monarchs become social, as I’ve mentioned. In the center of the continent, on the northern shores of the Great Lakes, even as Oberhauser and I walked and talked, these roosts were popping up like flash mobs just before dark on August evenings—only to vanish the next day by 10:00 a.m. or so.
Some of these 2018 roosting events in Canada turned into quite a human hoopla. When word got around that some of the roosts had hundreds of butterflies, hundreds of people turned up to see the spectacle. Quite a party. And then the insects vanished, soaring away when the winds and temperatures improved.
By September 5, only a few days after my visit to Oberhauser, at least some of them had successfully crossed Lake Erie. This was common knowledge because sightings of numerous monarchs were noted and photographed by observers in Erie, Pennsylvania. Their citizen scientist findings were posted on Journey North, a website that began in 1994 by tracking migrations of spring monarchs from Mexico into the U.S. and that has since expanded to track the journey south as well, funded by the Annenberg Foundation.
It’s run by Elizabeth Howard, who wanted to explore how the internet could be used to encourage conservation and citizen involvement. Since then, it has grown exponentially and now includes thousands of participants, who use their cell phones to photograph individual monarchs as well as roosts. They then post that data on a Journey North map along with relevant comments. Thus anyone who checks out the website can follow the migration of the monarchs north in the spring and south in the fall.
When I spoke with Howard on the phone during the early weeks of the 2018 migration, she gushed with enthusiasm.
“This has been the most exciting year, in years and years and years,” she told me. “Everybody across the breeding range has been talking about how productive the numbers are in their local areas. Everything points to a really positive season. The numbers this year are at least fourfold above last year.”
I asked: Why has this been such a great year?
“We saw the earliest-ever beginning of the breeding season. The monarchs returned early in the spring. And we started seeing them in June in numbers we wouldn’t normally see until July. Since then, the numbers just kept building. Now we are a whole generation beyond what we normally get.”
Their progress south is never a steady trek. Whenever possible, they must stop for food. One Journey North observer reported a previously tagged male who had hung around in Canada, on a lake’s northern shore, for a few days. He had been fueling up on nectar from blooming fall flowers. Over the course of one week, from the first tagging to a later recapture, monitors found that he had increased his weight by more than 50 percent. That’s how important nectar plants are on the butterfly highway leading south.
A second male, tagged at 10:00 a.m. and then caught again four hours later at 2:00 p.m., had increased his weight by 34 percent. What had he been eating? Apparently he had found the butterfly equivalent of extreme chocolate cake—double chocolate with buttercream frosting. Maybe with some ice cream on top.
Migrating monarchs pig out like this for one reason: they need fuel. Surfing the winds, lovely as it sounds, requires a lot of energy. Best to eat as much as possible when food is available. There’s another reason. If they arrive at their overwintering site in the Mexican mountains depleted of energy reserves, they may well not survive their winter ordeal, huddling against the cold while undergoing unavoidable fasting. In the Michoacán mountains, inside the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve at 12,000 feet, the insects will find little, if anything, to eat. They have to survive until at least February before starting their return journey north.
And so monarch advocates began their “butterfly highway” project. All along the central flyway, state and local governments, gardeners, farmers, property owners—whoever they could entice—would be encouraged to plant a plethora of nectar sources. Some of these plantings, they hoped, would be various milkweed species. This was to provide egg-laying opportunities for female monarchs heading north in the spring. But for the journey south, a variety of native plants would do: joe-pye weed, various species of goldenrod, butterfly bush and butterfly weed, verbena, asters … The list is quite long. Whereas milkweed and only milkweed will do for egg-laying, nectaring monarchs use many different plants.
In her office, Oberhauser and I talked about the numbers of migrating monarchs this year. Her excitement was infectious.
“We’re seeing a lot this year,” she said. “If they have a good fall migration, they’ll do well.”
But she was still cautious. Even if this spectacular summer brought about a fabulous southern migration resulting in huge numbers of monarchs in Mexico, to her mind that didn’t guarantee the future of the iconic butterfly.
She said: “Populations bounce around. A lot.”
Although early-migration anecdotal evidence was encouraging, she warned, until the monarchs arrive at their winter Mexican destination, there is no definitive way to estimate their population numbers. Unlike the small blue butterflies, monarchs don’t really have a home base. So the best way to estimate yearly populations is to estimate the size of the overwintering roosts in the mountains of Mexico.
Figures are presented in terms of hectares of trees occupied in the region, but even that is only an estimate, since we now know that roosting monarchs don’t stay put for the whole of the wintering season. Nevertheless, this per-hectare data is the most definitive scientists have.
Records have been kept this way since the winter of 1994–1995. In 1996–1997, almost 21 hectares were occupied. But the next year only 5.77 hectares were occupied. A drop of 75 percent.
That in itself wasn’t necessarily cause for alarm, since the species’ numbers are highly volatile, as bouncy as a super-rubber ball. For insects, extreme differences from year to year are the norm, rather than the exception. But over the twenty-five or so years that per-hectare records have been kept at the Mexican overwintering sites, despite the bouncing-ball numbers, there has been a clear downward slope. A crisis point was reached by the winter of 2013–2014. Numbers had dropped to a near-disastrous 0.67 occupied hectares.
When numbers are that small, one severe climate event could wipe out nearly the whole of the central flyway population. Something like that has already happened. During the 2015 fall migration, Hurricane Patricia barreled toward Mexico at precisely the time when the butterflies were moving toward the mountains. The two trajectories seemed likely to intersect.
When Patricia’s winds reached 215 miles per hour, residents and tourists both began to flee. Monarch advocates were on tenterhooks. “How does an insect the size of a paper clip fare in a hurricane?” asked one Mexican newspaper, echoing the fears of many monarch fans. But when Patricia hit land on the nation’s west coast, the storm dissipated. Simultaneously, the butterflies themselves shifted their migratory path. They seemed to sense the coming weather. They may have taken refuge in ravines and other sheltering areas of the Sierra Madre Oriental.
Another weather disaster in January of 2002 was not so easily escaped. Normally the overwintering region is dry at this time of year, but on that occasion rain began falling. At higher elevations—where the butterflies are—the rain turned to snow. For three consecutive nights, temperatures fell below 30 degrees Fahrenheit. Clustering together in the Mexican mountain forests helps the butterflies keep warm, but these temperatures were too much for the ectothermic insects. Observers began seeing them fall from their branches onto the ground, where they lay either cold-shocked with wings in tatters, or dead. Scientists believe that the insects might have survived the cold temperatures had they not already been wet from the rain and snow. Moisture and freezing temperatures had delivered a one-two punch.
In early October 2018, I walked with volunteers looking for monarchs and other butterflies at one of the most unusual stops along the butterfly highway that I expect ever to see. I had come to The Wilds, a nonprofit site in southeastern Ohio that bills itself as a safari park, conservation center, and living laboratory.
At The Wilds you can take a “safari ride,” a narrated bus tour that takes visitors past the variety of exotic animals who roam this park of nearly 10,000 acres. The site harbors endangered animals such as Grevy’s zebras, white rhinos, onagers, scimitar-horned oryx, and even Przewalski’s horses. For an extra fee, you can get a behind-the-scenes tour and meet the animals’ keepers. You can also go on a horseback trail ride, take a zipline tour, go fishing, stay overnight in a yurt, go hiking and cycling.
The Wilds hosts a remarkable restored butterfly habitat. Since 2004, volunteers and staff at The Wilds have regularly walked the same transect line over and over again. As I walked this line with them, we looked for butterfly species along the line itself and up to fifteen feet on either side of the line. When someone saw a butterfly, they called out and the record keeper wrote the sighting down.
“Monarch,” someone called out.
“Oh, that’s a beauty,” another said.
And it was. Its wings were a rich orange, so much so that the insect was almost red. It looked new and fresh, as though it had emerged only a day or so before. This was quite possible, as the area had been planted with swamp milkweed many years ago, and the species continues to thrive here.
The monarch flew from flower to flower, fueling up for the trip south. There was plenty to imbibe. Several species of goldenrod were ubiquitous. There were purple asters and small white asters nestled comfortably among the tall grasses. A few end-of-season coneflowers remained. A limited number of milkweeds continued to bloom, and there were plenty of open pods, which promised a good crop the following year.
We were walking in a butterfly Nirvana. We saw plenty, including cabbage whites, of course, and viceroys and skippers and yellow sulfurs and eastern tailed blues, cousins of the Karner blues.
There was a lot going on in this species-rich prairie. I had been told to wear sturdy shoes and arrived in a pair of sturdy but low ankle boots. My host Rebecca Swab, director of restoration ecology, took one look at them and shook her head. Fortunately, I keep all kinds of footwear in my car, since you never know what kind of adventure you might find in any one day. There are usually kayaking shoes, flip-flops, riding boots, athletic shoes… .
On that day, my preparedness paid off. I pulled out a pair of heavy leather lace-up boots, the kind for heading into the back of beyond. I felt sure she would think this was overkill. Instead, she nodded approvingly. It didn’t take long to find out why I needed them. This was a short walk of less than a mile, but much of it involved mud and out-of-control streams. Recently beavers had found out about the place. They had been busy. We left the “civilized” trail, nice for casual tourists, and walked up into a small bit of forest, then down into a wetland area. The ground was littered with beaver leftovers: wood chips, tree stumps, and half-gnawed branches. With the help of nature’s super-talented engineers—and with the help of the endless rains that had fallen on the region throughout the summer—the wetlands had far exceeded their known boundaries.
We crossed a stream on what had once been a minimal footbridge but was now mostly submerged logs. We trudged through mud. Beavers had taken over large parts of this particular butterfly habitat, but that wasn’t a bad thing. Frogs were croaking. There was horse balm everywhere. Queen Anne’s lace flourished. In the end, this evolving system would provide even more nurture for Lepidoptera.
This nature “park” was thriving. Life here had decided to do its own thing and did not want to be contained by any false, human-engendered limits. So what if human beings wanted the stream and pond in one particular place? The beavers had other ideas. The Wilds staff let the beaver-driven natural succession choose its own course. All this was terrific for the butterflies. Flowering plants grew everywhere along the edges of the mess made by the beavers.
But frankly, none of this should have been there. This whole park of nearly 10,000 acres is a former strip mine. I am all too familiar with strip mining. I grew up in southwestern Pennsylvania during strip mining’s heyday, when the mine owners could—and did—do as they pleased. Strip mining—stripping away the surface of the earth to get at the goodies beneath—was the rule rather than the exception.
Reclaiming strip-mined land requires patience.
So The Wilds butterfly habitat, which has been carefully rehabilitated over a period of years, holds special significance. If the variety of butterfly species found in this small area of semi-restored prairie is any indication, the devastation can be ameliorated. Time will be the only true healer of this devastated land, but human efforts can pay off to a considerable degree. Common species seen here now include monarchs, cabbage whites, clouded and cloudless sulfurs, pearl crescents, and Delaware skippers. Also seen are gray hairstreaks; pipevine, black, and spicebush swallowtails; question marks; and great spangled fritillaries.
It takes a long time, thousands of years, to replace the carbon on the land surface that strip mining removes. Without carbon, the butterflies disappear along with other insects and the rest of animal life.
No carbon no plants.
No plants no animals.
No us.
The math is that simple.
Meanwhile, elsewhere along the butterfly highway, observers continued to report with great excitement. Monarch numbers continued to look spectacular. On the Kansas-Colorado border, five hundred were seen gathered on a tree as early as mid-September. “I’ve never seen so many,” reported someone in Claremore, Oklahoma, on October 5. Around the same time in Ropesville, Texas, they were seen arriving over the course of an entire week. “Absolutely beautiful,” reported another observer in a nearby town.
By mid-October in Hobbs, New Mexico, on the border with Texas, thousands were reported roosting in a cemetery. Hundreds were seen in a tree in Abilene, Texas, where, the observer reported, they had roosted repeatedly over the years. The butterflies were beginning to “funnel,” that is, to gather into larger and larger groups as they neared Mexico. By the time they crossed the Mexican border, they had become a rushing stream.
In Tulsa, where I was soon headed, the local newspaper reported “hundreds of thousands” moving through. “They’re making a comeback!” announced the Conservation Coalition of Oklahoma. In Bixby, just south of Tulsa, on October 6 a citizen scientist reported to Journey North: “Monarchs east to west, north to south, as far out and up as I could see with 10X binoculars… . a steady flow going south on the wind, with 20 to 40 in view at any one time.” Along the western and eastern flyways, a different storyline played out. David James in Washington State was reporting near-disastrous numbers of overwintering populations up and down the California coastline. “Nobody knows for sure why our numbers are down so low,” he told me.
The offspring of the butterflies that had managed to survive the previous winter in California weren’t “that great,” he continued. “We always go down at the end of May on Memorial Day to a certain spot on the California-Oregon border. We saw the lowest number that we’ve seen in the last five years. Something wasn’t quite right.”
And at Crab Creek, where we had met in that horrendous heat the previous year, James found nary a monarch throughout the whole of the summer of 2018: “Not a single one. They just didn’t arrive. They got to Washington, but only along the state border. In the whole of central Washington, there wasn’t a reliable sighting.”
I asked if this might have had something to do with the fires that had burned once again throughout the region.
“This was in June, before the fires,” he said. “It just didn’t happen.”
There was, however, good news east of the Rockies. I spoke with butterfly observer Gayle Steffy in Pennsylvania, who explained that she was a “monarchs for life” person. When she was thirteen, she found a monarch caterpillar in a field near her home, which she raised and released.
When she was fourteen, she and her brother found a book about monarchs in their local library. In the back of the book, it gave Fred Urquhart’s name and address, in case readers wanted to participate in his tagging program. She wrote, but got a letter back from him announcing that tagging was “over.”
So she created her own tags and her own tagging program. On the tag, she provided a post office box so that she could be contacted by anyone who found her tags.
Eventually she did get a letter—from Mexico. And so now, forty years later, she is still at it. Now using tags from Monarch Watch, an influential nonprofit I was soon to learn a lot more about, she keeps on counting monarchs and tagging monarchs and planting milkweed and all kinds of nectar plants, every year.
Steffy recently published a paper with thirty years of monarch data. “When I started crunching the numbers, I found out that early migrants are more successful, early migrants tend to be larger than later migrants, and that early migrants tend to be male rather than female.”
This was a curious fact, I suggested.
“Females on average are smaller than males,” she answered. “That may be why.”
Steffy said that her observations this year suggested that monarch numbers east of the mountains seemed to be quite high, but that the insects were not ending up in Cape May, New Jersey, well known as a location where many migrating monarchs stop to enjoy the flowers for a few days before continuing their southern journey. Instead, she said, the winds were so favorable that they were heading down the western side of Chesapeake Bay.
Why, I asked, were numbers so high in her area this summer?
“The rain,” she suggested. It wasn’t just that the overwhelming amount of rain was good for the plants and their flowers. It was also that fields that were routinely mowed several times a summer had been mowed less often.
“The rain was a blessing and a curse. I have one field that got flooded and everything got swept away. But I think it was also a blessing, because roadsides and many fields could not be mowed at all. Everything was too wet.” That was certainly one factor I hadn’t yet heard of.
In recent years, Steffy had suffered a tragedy. The two sites along the Susquehanna—a power plant and a road-building site—that she had monitored for decades were destroyed by herbicide spraying.
She got a grant from the corporation she works for to plant, along with others on her sustainability team, 2,000 pollinator plants. She’s also filling her own yard with butterfly-friendly plants.
“I’m creating my own habitat,” she said.
When I arrived in Tulsa in late October, this slowly revitalizing city, devastated decades earlier by an oil market crash, remained awash in monarch butterflies. It was nearing the end of the migration, but the insects were still coming. On an afternoon stroll through Gathering Place, a privately funded, recently opened riverside park, at least thirty monarchs flitted from nectar source to nectar source, fueling up for the final push to Mexico.
Nearby, monarchs and plenty of other butterflies enjoyed the abundance of still-flowering plantings on the grounds of the world-famous Gilcrease Museum. Tulsa has done a terrific job of providing nectaring areas for butterflies.
Outside city limits, butterflies were fewer, since there were fewer planted butterfly gardens, but they were still around. An hour north, in the Osage Hills at the Nature Conservancy’s 39,650-acre Tallgrass Prairie Preserve, most of the foliage had already senesced. The massive preserve, home to lots of bison and four different species of prairie grasses, including big bluestem that grows in some places to heights of nine feet, hosts roughly 100 different species of butterflies. At least nine species of those delicate little blues so loved by Nabokov—marine blue, western pygmy blue, eastern tailed blue, spring azure, summer azure, silvery blue, Jack’s silvery blue, Reakirt’s blue, Texas blue—thrive here throughout the entire season from spring to late fall.
Even though to my eyes most blooms were gone, the final waves of migrating monarchs searched there for food. They needed to make it to the Texas border within a day or so, the monarch scientist Chip Taylor told me, or the impending cold would prematurely end their lives. At well over 700 miles, the route was already depleted of nectariferous blooms. The future for these last stragglers did not look promising.
I was there to attend an event unique to Oklahoma: a meeting of the Tribal Alliance for Pollinators. Begun in 2014, the Alliance now includes seven of the thirty-nine tribes living in the state: Chickasaw, Seminole, Citizen Potawatomi, Muscogee (Creek), Osage, Eastern Shawnee, and Miami Nations. The purpose of the Alliance is to provide funding, training, and support to members of those tribes who wish to restore native plant habitats on tribal lands.
The three-day gathering began with a walk. Under overcast skies that foretold the soon-to-arrive winter, Taylor, eighty-one, and Andrew Gourd, thirty-one, a member of the Seneca-Cayuga Nation, led a group of us through a field of several acres. Located up in the northwestern corner of the state, in a region known as the “green country,” the countryside had already turned brown for the winter. But these browns were still interesting. For Taylor and Gourd, these few acres composed a gold mine of glorious depth, a labyrinth of epochal proportion.
I myself felt as though I’d reached the Promised Land. After two years of visiting butterfly habitat that had been vastly improved after much abuse, after looking at land that had been brought back from the brink—like the strip-mined lands of Ohio or the revitalized ranchlands of the Willamette Valley or the much-abused pine barrens near Albany, New York—I was finally getting to see land that looked somewhat like it had looked before European colonization.
This land was the real McCoy—the kind of land that, the soil microbiologist Nicola Lorenz explains, required several thousand years to evolve. As far as anyone could tell, this land was pretty much the way it had been for decades upon decades and centuries upon centuries.
“Never turned nor tilled,” Gourd told Taylor.
“As you drive through Oklahoma, think about the land,” Taylor had told the gathering before the walk. “Think about what the landscape must have looked like then [before homesteading], because it doesn’t look like that now.”
Taylor did not begin his career as a monarch researcher. Instead, after studying bees he shifted gears. With Lincoln Brower he began researching monarch migration issues. Today, as a university professor emeritus in Kansas, he is the founder and head of Monarch Watch, the nonprofit that supplies volunteers east of the Rockies with tags for butterflies. Begun in 1992, Taylor’s program now encourages the planting of bloom-rich “Monarch Waystations” along migratory flyways and supplies 400,000 tags for volunteers (Gayle Steffy among them) yearly. When butterflies with tags are found in Mexico, Monarch Watch pays $5 for each recovered tag, then checks the data to determine where across North America the insects were tagged.
The program, he said, had revealed a wealth of data about monarch behavior that would not have otherwise been discovered. “This data is just so important. It answers questions about the size of successful migrants. It answers questions about origins. It answers questions about mortality. It answers questions about orientation. It answers questions about conservation. It just answers a tremendous number of questions.”
To date, Taylor said, Monarch Watch has assembled something like 1.6 million bits of data. So much to analyze. So little time. Taylor has a phenomenally busy speaking schedule. From the end of October to the end of the year, he had five more events planned, along with the Thanksgiving and Christmas hiatus. He had just returned from the national capital, where he had been given a spectacular award—a monarch encapsulated in an exquisite glass weight—at the North American Pollinator Protection Campaign International Conference.
As he showed it to me, he looked pleased, but also tired.
I asked later why he continued to work so hard.
“Why not work until they carry you out?” he asked in return. “What are we here on this planet for? Just for our own gratification? Some people get gratification out of trying to make the world a better place. That’s where I come from. I ‘m going to try as long as I can. I enjoy what I do.”
In many areas of the state, Taylor told the group, when he looked at a piece of land he was hard-pressed to find ten or fifteen plant species on any one parcel. In comparison, healthy prairie parcels may have well over 100 species. Those plants that he did find had extremely shallow roots, roots that did not penetrate the ground deeply. This was a problem during Oklahoma’s sometimes years-long droughts.
On this Seneca-Cayuga land that we walked, we easily discovered at least forty species within the first minutes. Many of those plants had roots that delved deep into the soil, as much as six or ten or twenty feet below the surface. This made them drought resistant, since they could tap into moisture reservoirs that modern shallow-rooted grasses cannot access.
“Look at the diversity across this field,” Taylor continued, “without a break in the diversity. That’s probably what it looked like all across Oklahoma at one time.”
Or all across the tall grass prairies that covered central North America. Plowing up that thickly rooted soil required teams of as many as thirty hefty, muscular plow horses. And once the sod was separated from the ground, it was thick enough to be used to build “sod houses,” which kept families warm in winter and cool in summer because the roots provided so much insulation from the elements. You wouldn’t be able to do that with modern grass sod, flimsy and shallow-rooted.
Taylor reached out to get some seeds from a grizzly-looking thing commonly called a “rattlesnake master.” Standing five to six feet tall, with prickly leaves like yucca and thorns that reminded me of thistle plants, rattlesnake master is inescapably alluring to pollinators. Taylor pointed out two species of square-stemmed mints, compass plants, “six or ten species that you don’t see unless the field has been there for a long, long time. Seeds like these don’t get around easily. They’re not brought by floods, not carried by birds …”
“This land really is a sacred place,” Gourd said. “It is on a piece of property owned by Seneca-Cayuga tribal members and is truly pristine. It’s on a hilltop that managed to avoid logging. It probably looks just like it did when our ancestors got here in 1831.”
The federal government created a land allotment program for Indian families in 1887. Whether they wanted to own land or not, each tribal member was assigned a parcel. This particular land, part of the Cowskin Prairie of the Ozark Mountains foothills, was given to a member of the Whitetree family, Gourd said. The tribal member wanted to be left alone and farmed only twenty of the eighty acres received.
The remainder of the acreage, including this prairie remnant, simply fell by the wayside. The soil was rocky and would have required terracing, because it was on a slope. Forest was slowly encroaching and would have required logging. From the point of view of modern capitalism, it was worthless. No one wanted to own it. No one wanted to work it. All this makes this land priceless as an irreplaceable model for people living in the twenty-first century.
“If you walk a section line east from there,” Gourd said, “the land would have been grazed and tilled. You wouldn’t have had all that beauty. If you go south, you can see corn, a tree farm, whatever else that can take advantage of rich prairie soil. There wasn’t any kind of restoration or holding plan in place. It was just the luck of the draw that it managed to survive.”
I asked Gourd if he thought it would survive into the future.
We agreed that land like this was a national treasure, more important than gold or silver.
In California, by the end of the migration season, it looked like it was already too late to speak for the land. Or for the butterflies. Tens of thousands of acres of fires raged across the state, making the blazes of the year before look like mere campfires. Those fires took both the homes of poor people in the mountains, in towns with ironic names like Paradise, and the homes of the rich and beautiful and powerful in places like Malibu. By the conflagration’s end, nearly a hundred souls were known to have perished. Another thousand or so were missing. In Butte County, north of Sacramento, well over 150,000 acres burned. Nearly 20,000 buildings were destroyed. The fires spread quickly due to the chaotic climate of recent years. There had been an inordinate dry spell on the West Coast, while east of the Rockies we experienced the wettest fall ever recorded.
What happened to California’s migrating butterflies was anyone’s guess. All we know is that they never got to their destinations. After performing their Thanksgiving 2018 count, the Xerces Society of Oregon reported that the entire western population had declined by 87 percent. Overall, they declared the western population to be “critically low.”
At Pismo Beach, where the docent two years earlier had instructed the children in the story of the Butterfly Hotel, and where Kingston Leong and I had first met, and where tens of thousands of butterflies had overwintered for as long as anyone could remember, only 800 butterflies showed up. At the Morro Bay Golf Course, only 2,587 butterflies were found.
“Reasons for the drastic decline are not really known,” Leong explained. He suspected that the large fires in Washington State and Canada over the summer, coupled with the disastrous California fires during the fall migration, were an important cause. One study Leong had done showed that the butterflies are “very sensitive to smoke.”
“Hence, the fires that occurred in the fall may influence their migration to their coastal winter sites.” Scientists are still studying this question.
On the Texas/Mexico border, the migratory flights had become hung up. Torrents of rain and unfavorable winds rushing across the Texas plains had caused multitudes of butterflies to huddle together, trying to keep warm.
“They won’t go hungry, but first they’re going to have to settle down until things warm back up,” wrote Journey North contributor Dale Clark of Glenn Heights, Texas, on October 14, 2018. “I’ll be interested to see what happens once this horrible cold spell and rain finally ends.”
Then, just before Thanksgiving, the reports began to flow in: “We saw an average of about 10 per minute,” one Mexican commentator wrote from Querétaro. They were in Valle de Bravo, and elsewhere throughout the mountains. The first arrivals had been reported as early as November 7, and by the time of the American Thanksgiving, monarch numbers looked healthy and strong.
Taylor had predicted this outcome six months earlier, at the start of the northern migration season.