What Good Is A Butterfly?
T HE P OETICS
by Sandra Harper
“What good is a butterfly?” the entomologist Lincoln
Brower told journalist Robert Lee Hotz for Science
Journal. “It can tell you about the fundamental biology of
all creatures on this earth. There is something so funda-
mental about finding your way.”
S
everal falls ago while visiting the
Chihuahua Desert Research
Institute in Fort Davis, I heard
reports of monarch butterflies roosting
overnight at Balmorhea Lake during
their migration south to Mexico. The
following morning I took off for the
lake with two birder friends. We drove
north from Marfa through empty
grasslands crowned with volcanic
peaks. On the other side of Fort Davis
the road climbed an igneous mountain
in the Barillas then dropped down
onto a plain of grasses that had evolved
by the early Miocene Age and were
now struggling to survive.
The valley of Toyah Creek at
Balmorhea State Park is fed by a group
of artesian and gravity springs, and
there is so much water that a swim-
ming pool and a lake have been creat-
ed. By 1917 the natural cienega and
prehistoric site where Jumanos and
Mescalero Apaches lived and camped
had been transformed into a reservoir
by an earthfill dam. And evidently,
though hundreds of miles west of their
migratory flyway, the lake was also a
draw for monarch butterflies.
A vigilant osprey perched high on a
pole served as the lake's ruling sentry.
Grebes and teals swam across the
water's surface while a heron hunted in
the marshy reeds. Morning on the lake
was conspicuously silent, until a splash
of water sounded as breakfast was
caught.
The photographic image of thou-
sands of monarchs framing the figure
of a woman, Catalina Aguado, had
8
Cenizo
been in my memory since 1976, when
the discovery of the butterfly's winter
home was announced on the cover of
the National Geographic.
Searching through the pale forest of
billowing tamarisks beyond the water's
edge, we spotted monarchs high in the
branches, here and there taking off in
flight. Perhaps sunset, when the mon-
archs stop and rest overnight, would
have yielded sightings of clusters of
butterflies. Yet that morning was as
magical as if I were exploring the infa-
mous Oyamel fir forests of Mexico
where the butterflies over-winter.
Within days the first southern
migrating monarchs of the year would
fly over the Rio Grande and pass into
Mexico enroute to the Monarch
Reserve. Rocio Treviño of Mexico's
monarch tracking project, Correo
Real, would announce the triumphal
crossing on October 23rd to the world
on the Monarch Watch website. I
wondered if our monarchs resting
overnight at Balmorhea Lake would fly
directly south of us into the state of
Chihuahua, or travel southeast to re-
enter their migratory corridor and
cross the border into Coahuila.
The 217 square mile La Reserva de la
Biosfera Mariposa Monarca is under con-
stant stress. The Reserve has long suf-
fered from illegal logging operations,
moneymaking ventures for crime syn-
dicates. For most of the people who
make up the agrarian communities in
and around the Reserve, life is desper-
ate. Twenty-five percent are indige-
nous Mazahua. The men look for
Fourth Quarter 2014
OF
S URVIVAL
work in construction, while women
and children sell candy and gum on
the street. Often they live in a “cuartito
de carton,” a cardboard shack, a room
perhaps made from the trees in their
forest.
As Mexico-based economist David
Barkin declared, “There are two mira-
cles in the Monarch Reserve area. One
is that the butterflies have survived,
and the other is that the campesinos have
survived.”
The mountains of the Reserve are
isolated islands of boreal forests left by
receding glaciers 13,000 feet high in
Mexico’s Transverse Neovolcanic Belt
of the Sierra Madres. The air is cool.
Morning mists burn off in the sun.
During the winter months, millions of
monarchs cluster on the boughs and
cling to the tree trunks. The moist per-
sistent cloud cover keeps the butterflies
from drying out.
Lincoln Brower, the entomologist
who has been studying the monarch
since 1954 and has been an unflagging
activist for the past four decades,
describes the genius of the microcli-
mate: “Roosting on the trunk of the
tree at night is like sitting on a hot
water bottle.”
Gaps in the forest canopy created
by illegal logging threaten the butter-
flies’ ability to withstand the cold. “It’s
like sleeping under a blanket full of
holes,” says Brower. The freezing
wind blows through the forest more
easily than ever before.
In fact, the future of the monarch's
survival, certainly its migratory legacy,
is not solely Mexico's responsibility.
Perhaps equally or even more signifi-
cant to the monarch's decline - from
1.1 billion overwintering butterflies in
1996 to 33 million in 2014 - is the
destruction of the migratory corridor.
The butterfly's flyway stretches north
of Mexico through south and central
Texas, and passes into the summer
breeding grounds east of the Rockies,
reaching as far as Manitoba and
Ontario. A synchronous flight path
fans up through the eastern U.S. into
Quebec and Nova Scotia.
Waking from hibernation in
Mexico in March, flying northeast
across the border, the butterflies lay
their first eggs on antelope horn or
green milkweed in southern Texas.
The eggs hatch. The caterpillars feed
on the leaves of the milkweed, meta-
morphose, emerging as butterflies, and
continue north following the milk-
weed. If the milkweed is not plentiful
and the caterpillar doesn't get enough
to eat, the butterfly's wings will be
smaller and not as bright orange as a
stronger,
better-fed
monarch.
Drought, the loss of habitat to develop-
ment and industrial agriculture, the
mining of northern white sand for
fracking and pipelines, together with
the application of herbicides and pesti-
cides, have nearly made the milkweed
corridor disappear.
The development, marketing and
planting of “genetically modified
organisms (GMOs), like soybeans, that
tolerate herbicides” are cited in the
2007 North American Monarch
Conservation Plan as destroying and
fragmenting the butterfly’s flyway. In
the 90s Monsanto produced a soybean
that thrives despite repeated applica-
tions of its herbicide, Roundup, the
chemical glysophate. Glysophate kills
everything - the native floral sources,
including the milkweed – except
Monsanto's GMO bean.
Monsanto is not alone in the chem-
ical agriculture business – Bayer,
BASF, Dow, Syngenta and DuPont
just don't make as many headlines. All
are engaged in compromising the
integrity and survival of our water,
plants and animals. However since
weeds have become increasingly
glysophate resistant, Dow is poised to