Look about you at the little things that run the earth.
E. O. Wilson
At 10:00 a.m., right on time, a cloudburst of monarchs descending from their roosts met me head-on. A tangled palette of glittering color. Fantastical but nonetheless real. River of monarchs above a mountain stream, heading downward out of the forest and into the sun. All around me. I am one of them.
Gobsmacked again.
I consider myself jaded. Nearing my seventieth year, I’m a been-there-done-that oldster with a lot of world adventure under my belt. In my twenties I rode horses in Africa, galloping up and down sand dunes in the Sahara Desert with American Marines. In my thirties, I paddled the Okefenokee Swamp for a week, beginning a life as a travel writer. I have ridden elephants (not my favorite) and camels (most definitely not my favorite) and biked along many of America’s best bike paths and walked the fossil-filled hills of Provence and walked among the wild horses of Mongolia.
When I went to the mountains of Mexico as the final step in researching this book, I did not expect an otherworldly experience. I’d seen a lot of butterflies over the past two years, including a great many monarchs. I did not expect to be yet again spellbound by sunlight and color. But I was.
The experience was poignant. I wondered how Maria Sibylla Merian would have felt. In the bright mountain sunlight, the same bedazzlement that overwhelmed me when I saw that first Turner and when I saw those first butterfly boxes at Yale University took hold of me once more. As I trudged slowly up the steep high-altitude climb to the mountain peaks of the El Rosario entry point into the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve, the clouds shifted and the forest was filled with energy and sunlight.
The insects halted their descent and came to rest on the shrubs on both sides of the trail, spreading their wings to soak up the light. Standing in the warmth of the sun in the center of all that stained-glass-window color circling my head, I easily understood why local people celebrated the arrival of these insects each fall.
The migration of the monarchs from points as far north as Canada all the way south to these particular mountaintops is a world phenomenon that belongs to everyone on the planet. It’s a source of global joy, like the migration of the wildebeest on the Serengeti Plain or the migration of gray whales off the west coast of North America.
They are all following the sun, just as we would if we could.
And yet, one by one, these migrations are disappearing. Passenger pigeon migration: Gone. North American bison migration: Vanished. Reindeer migration: Seriously decimated.
In the midst of all this, Amelia and her monarch butterfly give us hope. Now, drunk with sunlight and monarch colors, I felt that hope once again, walking up the mountain path. Well-groomed though it was, the high-altitude walkway was steep. I live by the ocean and prefer my atmosphere oxygen-rich.
I stopped frequently to catch my breath and to watch the multitudes—the multitudes of descending insects, but also the multitudes of ascending human beings. They reminded me of the pilgrims I’d seen walking along Spain’s Camino de Santiago, or the pilgrims who were even then filling the roads leading into Mexico City to the Basilica of Guadalupe.
Most of the people who passed me by on the mountain trail as I stood and watched were not American tourists, as I had expected. They were Mexican. The family I remember most clearly: supported by three or four younger people, an elderly man who could barely move slowly inched his way up to the peaks where still more butterflies rested on still more branches.
Obviously in a lot of pain and discomfort, he was determined to get to the top. With one arm around one younger man and another arm around a younger woman, he put one foot in front of the other, never giving up.
“Why?” I asked José Luis Paniagua, my world-class guide who had brought me from Mexico City for the day.
It had to do with family and ancestors, he explained. They all came as a family to see the butterflies and wanted to have that experience together. No matter how difficult this trek was for him, he would have wanted to be part of the family. They would never have left him behind.
Butterflies unite us across generations and across space and across time. They are elemental. A butterfly is an entire universe, right there in the palm of your hand. As toddlers we reach for them instinctively. As children, we chase them. As adults we study them and learn how essential they are to our entire world. As we age, we see their gorgeous colors as something to love in our waning years.
The monarch joins together the Mexican family with their elderly grandfather in the Mexican mountains with Amelia and her mother, Molly, in the Willamette Valley, joins together Andrew Gourd, thirty-one, of the Seneca-Cayuga people with Orley “Chip” Taylor, eighty-one, the scientist from Kansas who has chosen to spend his last years working to protect this insect.
Butterflies unite people around the world, but also across time, from the inestimably brave Maria Sibylla Merian to the inestimably pensive Charles Darwin to the scores of contemporary scientists who continue to unlock the secrets of the world’s favorite insect. And yet there’s so much more to learn.
“We managed to get a man on the moon before we discovered where the monarchs went,” my butterflying friend Joe Dwelly pointed out one day at lunch.
Sadly, despite these centuries of hard work, butterfly numbers are diminishing. Indeed, scientists suspect that the entire group of living creatures that we call insects are suffering severe population depletions. There are banner years, to be sure. As I write this, butterfly monitors are celebrating the clouds of painted ladies that are showing up in the northern reaches of both the Eastern and the Western Hemispheres. But the numbers are stochastic, and the general trend shows a clear downward slope.
There are most likely a thousand—or a hundred thousand—reasons why. Complex, lush fields full of native nectar-filled plants have been turned into agrobusiness-dominated monocultures. Grass lawns cover vast acreages that were once resplendent with wildflowers. Pesticides are so prevalent that they now commonly pollute our drinking water and are a part of our body chemistry.
The climate chaos that I saw everywhere I went during my two years chasing butterflies is having an inestimable effect. Butterflies that are highly adapted to specific situations, like the delicate blue butterflies loved by Nabokov, have no chance against the roller-coaster climate we now live in.
But there are other, as yet not discovered, reasons why butterflies are disappearing. Research has revealed that monarch caterpillars that consume milkweed plants growing by some roadsides are saltier than caterpillars on milkweed plants growing by other roadsides. The difference: whether or not local road departments salt their roads in the winter. We are likely beginning a major period of evolutionary adjustment and a concomitant period of species extinctions.
It doesn’t have to be this way. We already have proof of concept. Once scientists unlocked the secret lifestyles of the small blue butterflies, they were able to bring them back from the brink.
If we are determined, we can accomplish great things. But why bother?
Us oldsters can remember a world of rich natural beauty, a world in which each month of the year brought new smells, new sounds, new sights, new promises of absolutely essential connections between humans and their natural surroundings.
That world is fast disappearing. But it’s not gone yet. We can get it back. When a five-year-old girl releases a butterfly into the air, and when that butterfly is seen by other people as it flies to its winter destination, that, to my mind, is the real butterfly effect: the joining together of countless people of many different nations, across generations, in a united effort to protect at least one small joyful piece of the natural world to which we belong.