King of the Forest
(Originally published in W, The West Weekend Magazine)
It’s 8am on a cool, late-winter morning, and we’re in the middle of a wooded mountainside in the central Mexican highlands, hunting butterflies. They shouldn’t be too hard to find. Each year, up to 250 million of the bright orange insects—once dubbed the Elvis of butterflies, for their flashy, patterned wings—arrive here en masse, to hibernate and breed among the towering oyamel fir trees. It’s one of natural science’s most spectacular sights, and one of its biggest mysteries.
No one knows exactly how the butterflies, with a ten centimetre wing-span and weighing just half a gram each, navigate the 4500 km distance from the Great Lakes district in Canada and Northern USA to the same 12 forest groves in Mexico each year, sometimes to the exact same tree. It’s a return journey that outlives the lifespan of any single butterfly. Their sense of direction is impeccable. Unlike ours: we’re lost. Having declined offers from local boys to guide us, we’ve managed to miss the path not once, but twice.
Now, trudging the steep, dusty tracks in the temperate volcanic ranges of the Sierra Chinqua Monarch Butterfly Sanctuary, our hopes rise as we come across the remains of fallen butterflies, the sight of their pumpkin-coloured wings in the dirt suggesting we’re close. But instead of trees bulging with butterflies, we discover something more sinister: the blanket of firs drops away to reveal patches of naked land recently logged, rubbish strewn in a clearing around burnt-out campfires, plastic drink bottles, corn chip packets, cake wrappers and toilet paper rolls on the ground.
Despite a logging ban since 2000 in the 124,000-acre sanctuary, errant lumberjacks and impoverished local farmers have been cutting down wood, planting corn and running livestock into butterfly territory, wrecking the habitat and threatening a 10,000-year old migratory route. In March, satellite photos posted on a NASA website revealed illegal loggers had cut down large swathes, or a total of 1,100 acres, of the century-old trees that shelter the butterflies in just four years. Researchers claim that millions of monarchs have died from exposure to wind and cold in clear-cut areas, and millions more are at risk.
“Since 2000, we’ve had the three lowest populations we’ve ever seen at these over-wintering sites,” says Chip Taylor, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Kansas. Taylor heads Monarch Watch, a program run by the University dedicated to research and conservation of the butterfly. “On the surface, it looks like the population is going down. Previously, the population occupied 22 acres. Now, we’re only averaging about 15 acres per year. This year the population was 11 acres.”
For many scientists, it’s a bio-tragedy waiting to happen. While monarch butterflies themselves aren’t under threat of extinction, their unique migratory pattern is. Other monarch colonies exist, including in Australia, though they don’t travel as far as their American counterparts. Like birds, the American monarchs fly south for the winter each year. But unlike birds, they don’t return—it’s their grandchildren and great-grandchildren who make the round trip.
They set out on their journey in August, a billowing cloud traveling distances of up to 80 kilometres a day, and arrive in Mexico in the autumn months of October and November. Once here, they hibernate among the trees. Then, when the northern spring arrives in March, they mate, abdomen to abdomen, in the air, with the males carrying the females underneath. The exhausted males die shortly after, and the pregnant females fly north to the southern US states of Texas and Florida, where they lay their eggs in milkweed bushes, then die themselves.
The eggs hatch into brightly coloured caterpillars that feed on the milkweed, then make cocoons and emerge in late May. The young butterflies then continue the return journey north, breeding along the way, until they reach the Great Lakes region by mid-August. It takes from three to five generations of butterflies, living one to eight months each, to complete the entire round trip from Canada to Mexico and back, one of the most complex migrations in the animal world. Why and how they do it is still a mystery.
In fact, the monarch’s over-wintering location remained a mystery until 1975, when a US citizen living in Mexico chanced across the butterflies while driving through the area (he thought he’d driven into a hail storm). Until then, scientists in the US had been aware of the butterflies’ disappearance each year, but no one knew where they went. Many discounted the theory that they migrated, arguing that the butterflies lacked not only the size and sturdiness of birds, but also the necessary life-span.
The area's local residents always knew about the monarchs; they just didn't know where they came from. The butterflies arrive in Mexico around the first of November—the Mexican Day of the Dead—and local legend claims they were the returning spirits of dead children or the souls of lost warriors. Other locals thought they were a plague that threatened to destroy their valuable lumber crop, and tried to fumigate them.
Once authorities realised the significance of the butterflies, the Mexican government declared the area a Reserva de la Biosfera, giving protected status to lands that had previously been distributed to the local indigenous people in the form of communal agricultural cooperatives. Locals were angry. They felt that prohibiting logging and inviting tourists to invade their homes destroyed their economy. Illegal loggers paid them to turn a blind eye to their activities and not renounce them to the authorities. Thus began a four-way struggle between conservationists, illegal loggers, locals and the government that continues to this day.
This year, the fight got ugly. In early March, Mexican authorities raided 19 illicit saw mills in the area and confiscated 6,000 tons of logs and boards—about 600 truckloads—in the country’s biggest ever anti-logging raid. However, in a country as poor, chaotic and corrupt as Mexico, the problem is a complex one to solve.
“It’s a remote area, and it’s difficult to police,” Kansas University’s Taylor says. “There are elements that are quite forceful in their logging. They carry guns. They overpower the local residents. They sneak in there at night, sometimes with 100 trucks, and clear out 5 to 7 acres. And we’ve got the local residents contributing to this as well. Now that they’ve taken out most of the areas where the butterflies don’t occur, they’re going to be starting work on the areas where they do occur. This prospect is very ominous and is a serious threat to the over-wintering population.”
However, Mexico's National Commission for Natural Protected Areas (CONANP) says that the problem of illegal logging is actually getting better, not worse, largely due to a compensation program for communities who abide by logging bans. Better surveillance and coordination between government, police and locals has also helped. “Of course it’s extremely worrisome that parts of the forest have been destroyed,” says Dr Ernesto Christian Enkerlin Hoeflich, CONANP’s National Commissioner. “But if you look at it in terms of where we were five or six years ago, (illegal logging) has been substantially reduced.”
There’s also an aggressive tree restoration program, and efforts to educate communities about environmental issues. Gradually, locals are becoming convinced that this is a good thing. They work as guides and horse packers, security and parking guards, ticket sellers, and craft and food vendors. Dusty Mexican villages near the sanctuaries have been converted into tourist-towns, now dedicated to the humble butterfly. We arrived in Angangueo, a pretty, 5000-soul town with brightly coloured houses climbing up the hillside, in time for the annual “Festival of the Butterfly”. The main attraction turned out to be a three-piece band in the Plaza singing off-tune love songs, while teenagers in ford and dodge pickup trucks did laps of the cobblestones. Still, it’s a sign that the idea of tourism is starting to take off.
Back in the woods, we eventually find our way to the butterflies. When we arrive, they’re sleeping, hanging in clusters from the fir trees like bulging bunches of grapes. With their wings closed, they look brown. But as the sun emerges from the clouds and warms their cold-blooded bodies, the waking butterflies stir. Brown turns to golden saffron, as the monarchs spread their wings and take flight. Within half an hour the sky above us fills with clouds of swirling butterflies, like orange snow. They fly around the tree branches and down to the forest floor, where they rest on the foliage or drink from a small creek. Suddenly, with a child’s shout, a cluster of sleeping monarchs wakes and explodes en masse, like fireworks.
Esteban, a local guide, holds a finger to his lips and shushes the small crowd gathered on the dusty hill-slope to watch the spectacle. He says loud sounds scare the insects away. Already, the butterflies of Sierra Chinqua have moved several hundred metres from last years’ site, away from the car park, where noisy tourists eat from taco stands and bargain with vendors for butterfly key chains and fridge magnets.
“We need to respect the butterflies,” he says, talking in hushed tones, “or they’ll fly away and not come back.”