Suspension of Flight

Monarchs are weedy and hardy, but their great migrations of time immemorial, it seems, are not.

 
Black specks crisscross gray sky above La Lagunita. Usually, nothing makes me happier than watching the monarchs fly, but I find this display discomfiting. Butterflies do not leave their trees when it’s overcast, but these are flittering forth despite the chill. It’s mid-November, and they’ve been flying since September from as far away as Canada to reach our mountain in Central Mexico. Now that they are here, they are restless when they should be resting. I zip up the hoodie I’d tied around my waist during the hot hike up and start filming their flight.

Even though it takes monarchs three to four generations to pull off their annual migration, they always seek out the same stands of trees on Cerro Pelón, forming colonies in spots last occupied by their great-great-grandparents or beyond. No one is sure how these newcomers find the same sites. Unsubstantiated theories include the earth’s electromagnetism, the scent of their dead, and chemical markers from the previous season’s pee. There is another characteristic of the sections of forest where they make their roosts: they are intact and therefore offer a microclimate that shelters the monarch colony from temperature extremes.

The late monarch butterfly expert Lincoln Brower, who had a fondness for folksy analogies, compared the intact forest canopy to a blanket that keeps the monarch colony warm. Brower, who died in 2018, was a rarity among monarch researchers: he was vocal about demanding better protection of their overwintering grounds. When pandemic layoffs sent workers home to the tiny towns that surround the sanctuaries, poaching in the protected area picked up. Now people are punching holes in the blanket that covers La Lagunita, pilfering trees throughout the grove.

While we have hiked for more than two hours from the State of Mexico side of the sanctuary to reach La Lagunita, this roosting site lies much closer to the communities of Nicolas Romero in Michoacán. Our village, Macheros, hosts an entry to the preserve, while Nicolas Romero residents see no direct economic benefit from the butterflies. The hills around their hamlets are dry and denuded of trees, and now their loggers are inching up the mountain, pecking away at the sanctuary’s core protected area. One of these clandestine loggers was recently deported from the United States: another reminder of our interconnectedness.

My hiking companion, my sister-in-law Ana, wants to stay at the colony longer, but watching fallen butterflies quiver on a forest floor marred by jagged stumps and piles of wood chips makes me feel like fleeing. We take a different path on the hike down. In a part of the descent that was once a tunnel of trees, sunlight slants through, and the smell of freshly cut fir fills the air. Alongside the trail, we spot a newly felled oyamel, its toppled crown still green with life. Ana sucks air through her teeth in disapproval.

“Can I film your reaction?”

“¿Ingles o español?”

“English.” Subtitling is the most time-consuming part of our video projects.

“It makes me sad to see this,” she offers. A big smile breaks open her round face as she speaks. Cameras and English make her nervous. Later she says that pretending to give a tour in front of a camera is much harder than actually leading large groups of turistas up the mountain.

Once I’d been one of those turistas, and Ana’s brother Joel had been my guide. At the time, I was slogging through a divorce and a dissertation and getting out of bed in the morning was a struggle. That day, the monarchs formed their first roost just above where they tried to form one nine Novembers later.

Joel and I were lying on a slope looking up into fir trees covered with dark leafy clumps. We’d ridden horses up rocky switchbacks through a mossy forest for what felt like hours to reach this stand of high-altitude conifers. Joel had entertained me with stories about growing up in a family of ten, about his dad’s job as a forest ranger, about walking across the desert as a teen to break into my country so he could earn dollars and get “a better life.” He’d come home a year earlier, but his village at the sanctuary entry felt small and stifling, and he still wasn’t sure if he wanted to stay.

I sensed his loneliness. I felt lonely too. But just then the sun slid out from behind a cloud and warmed the clusters that dangled above us. One butterfly fluttered forth, and then another. Suddenly the entire tree burst into the sky. I’d never seen anything so beautiful as the sight of their orange wings backlit by blue sky. Their collective flapping created a vibration that I imagined had the power to heal my heart. Joel was grinning, flashing square white teeth, porcelain caps purchased with tips earned doing manicures on Long Island. Even though he’d seen this spectacle hundreds of times, he looked as ecstatic as I felt.

I didn’t feel lonely anymore.

There used to be two monarch butterfly migrations in North America, one that took place west of the Rockies, and another to the east of this range, where the flyway runs from southern Ontario through the Midwest and eastern seaboard before funneling through Texas and onward to central Mexico. But over Thanksgiving of 2020, when about a hundred volunteers ventured forth to individually count the butterflies in California’s overwintering roosts, they only encountered a handful. The population had already fallen from over a million in the nineties to barely 30,000 last year. Only 1,941 monarchs visited their overwintering sites this year.

In San Diego County, citizen scientist Rob Wood tells me that the number of sites surveyed exceeded the number of individual butterflies counted within them. While monarchs continue to frequent backyards, their spectacular agglomerations along the coast are no more.  

The disappearance of the overwintering colonies in California constitutes an extirpation rather than extinction, meaning the end of a localized phenomenon rather than the disappearance of a species. Monarchs are weedy and hardy, but their great migrations of time immemorial, it seems, are not.

In the same conversation, Rob mentions the flightless monarch he’s reared who still lives with him. She’s learned how to ask him for a Gatorade-soaked sponge by bobbing up and down. “So see, they’re adapting,” he says grimly.

Or maybe he just says this matter-of-factly and I’m projecting my own bleakness onto the blurry video screen. I’m not interested in keeping a butterfly as a pet. What I want is transcendence.

For six weeks, newly arrived monarchs try and fail to form a colony in La Lagunita. Many move to where the colony was the year before, above a meadow called El Llano de Tres Gobernadores. Many more leave our part of the mountain entirely.

In December, I make the journey to see their new location with Joel. We start our hike at a place called Lo de Cipriano. I position Joel in front of a multipronged oak tree and ask him to explain that the sanctuary was no pristine wilderness when the monarchs were discovered in 1975. “This used to be people’s farmland,” he begins. He gestures at the rows of rocks that are the remains of fences, demarking fields that belonged to people—like this one, Cipriano’s Place, where Joel’s grandpa grew corn, collected firewood, and cut trees to sell.

 

Cipriano Rojas is a gnome of a man who is partial to white cowboy hats and slacks held up with big belt buckles. His bedroom, next door to the room of a wife who hasn’t spoken to him in decades, is decorated with old calendar art of fighting cocks, a good spirit animal for him. Usually, he can be found sputtering with rage. I have trouble following his rants, but I do catch the objects of his vitriol: “la Reserva” and “CEPANAF.”

The first is shorthand for the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve, which was created in 1986 and later expanded to encompass 59 different ejidos and 13 indigenous communities. These local-level political jurisdictions still have claims on their communal forests, but now they are supposed to ask permission of the Reserve before exploiting its resources. Cipriano is outraged by this encroachment on local sovereignty.

His other enemy, CEPANAF, is the name of the agency that has employed forest rangers on Cerro Pelón since 1977. Joel’s dad joined their ranks in 1982, and Joel’s brother Patricio (better known as Pato) took over his job in 2014. CEPANAF neglected to ask the ejiditarios’ opinion about these hiring decisions. Pato, like 85 percent of the people living in our ejido, isn’t even an ejiditario. Ejiditario is a hereditary position passed from father to youngest son, and only ejiditarios have the right to participate in the political process. Everyone else is disenfranchised.

We start walking again, but I’m still thinking about Cipriano. I don’t understand why he wants the only workers with pensions and benefits in their ejido to be fired. To me, it seems like the problem isn’t that three people have good jobs, but that the other 1,470 folks who live here do not.

I think that this decades-old resentment is behind the closure of our sanctuary this season. The commissioner of our ejido is the most loyal of Cipriano’s sons. He and his governing board used the pandemic as an excuse to not buy the required tourism permit from the Reserve, a decision that shuttered Cerro Pelón to tourists.

 

Despite the closure, when Joel and I reach the colony several hours later, we encounter visitors, people from the surrounding communities. Closed just means no entry fees and no guides, so people wander in and out, before and after hours, cutting footpaths underneath the butterfly trees when the rangers aren’t there to stop them.

We disapprove, but we do the same; we sneak in so we can stand under the trees and stare up at swaying clusters slung above tall trunks that are coated with butterflies like leaves. From a distance, the colony looks small—there are only 25 trees with butterflies on them. In past seasons, there have been 100 or more. But there underneath them in their forest, I can recapture the feeling for a moment, the energy and wonder of their presence as I first experienced it.

I know so much more about the monarchs now than I did then. Standing at the base of a towering oyamel, looking up at the monarchs tightly wedged around its trunk, another Lincoln Brower analogy comes to mind, what he called “the hot water bottle effect.” Old-growth trees exude nighttime temperatures in the day and daytime temperatures at night, and the monarchs cling to them as a way of keeping cool or warming up.

Fewer dead butterflies litter the ground under the older-growth trees in El Llano, not like the carpet of casualties we saw under the younger trees in La Lagunita. El Llano is in the State of Mexico, part of the jurisdiction of the CEPANAF forest rangers. La Lagunita is in Michoacán, a state that has never paid full-time forest protectors. As Joel’s mom is given to saying, “If it weren’t for CEPANAF, the ejiditarios would have finished off this part of Cerro Pelón as well.”

On December 15, 2020, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service weighed in on a six-year-old petition to have the monarch butterfly listed as endangered. They had the option of saying yay, nay, or, the one they choose, “warranted but precluded at this time.” In other words, the monarch migration is clearly in mortal danger, but the federal government will not take action. Listing would have meant a comprehensive federal plan to save them and more funding instead of the patchwork of efforts we have now.

Extirpation seems to be on the verge of happening in the West, and annual surveys of the Eastern overwintering population suggest a 90 percent decline in the numbers of overwintering monarchs over the last 20 years. The explanation for this population collapse is fiercely debated. An older generation of biologists swears by “the milkweed limitation hypothesis,” which posits that agro-industrial herbicides and development have reduced the availability of the only plant monarchs can lay their eggs on, hence their decline. More junior colleagues dispute the primacy of milkweed and point to multiple factors, like a lack of nectar sources or traffic mortality. But the indeterminacy of this counternarrative makes it less compelling than “plant milkweed.”

Apart from a few nods to deforestation in Mexico, neither camp talks much about the health of the overwintering grounds where the Eastern migration spends a third of the year concentrated on a few acres. That could be because there isn’t much information about what’s going on with their forest in Mexico.

Unlike the California count and its corps of volunteers, the census of the much larger Mexican population is a smaller scale, non-transparent affair. As far as I understand it, a handful of survey workers affiliated with the World Wildlife Fund-Mexico draw a line around the trees the butterflies occupy. Then they multiply this area by a secret number to get the count. They are the only group that is allowed to monitor monarchs in Mexico, and they do not employ anyone local in this process.

When the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve was established in the 1980s, Mexico was in the middle of a debt crisis and its federal government was too broke to fund a new protected area, so state and private agencies took up the slack. Where we live in the State of Mexico, CEPANAF stepped in with its forest rangers. These state workers have had an uneasy relationship with the federal reserve that was founded nine years later. But for the most part, the rangers are on their own in a forest where no one else has ever committed resources.

Meanwhile, in Michoacán, a Mexican non-profit called Pro-Monarca managed the sanctuaries. Pro-Monarca got most of its funding from the WWF, and by the mid-1990s, the WWF took over administration of the sanctuaries and pushed Pro-Monarca out.

When I talk to monarch conservation professionals in the United States about how top-down conservation is failing the monarchs and their Mexican neighbors, they mutter about the need to respect Mexican sovereignty and how intervening could be perceived as imperialist. This fear fails to understand that Reserve residents are already the neglected subjects of fiefdom run by an unaccountable foreign charity. The late Prince Philip served as the honorary WWF president for many years. When he died, people shared images with me of “the monarch surrounded by monarchs” in a Mexican meadow.

I clicked Like, but the image made me rueful.

 

After our December butterfly visit, my knees ached for days. Twenty years ago, I ate an unwashed tomato slice on a sandwich in Guatemala and came down with a case of reactive arthritis that put me in the hospital where they suctioned pus out of my knees. It was a year before I could walk with ease again. Sometimes that pain comes back. Sometimes, meaning every single step of the 2,000-foot descent. Joel, who had been so patient with my slowness when we met, no longer is.

I thought we would visit the butterflies a lot during this season of shutdown, but January passes without planning another trip. I don’t want to be told repeatedly to “hurry up,” only to reach a colony whose puniness makes my heart hurt.

By February, the monarchs start flying down from their colony in search of nectar, and Ana and I start hiking in to a halfway point every day. Most of the trail is flat, set on wide, winding roads built for a train track back before the Mexican Revolution, when this mountain and the adjacent valley belonged to one family of timber barons.

Apart from the hacienda building and a few stray rail spikes, these trails are the only physical evidence of this history. I imagined that the rails were pilfered by angry revolutionaries. But when I ran this theory by one of the oldest men in town, 83-year-old Leonel Espinoza de Jesus, he corrected me: “Nah, the railroad company came and took it all up.”

The revolutionary peasants did get the titles to the hacendado’s land, but not until 1933, 13 years after the revolution ended and five years before Leonel was born. His father proudly related the fight for the ejido to him, how they had to walk for days to wait outside of offices in Mexico City and Toluca to get those titles. They enjoyed unfettered access to their property for only 42 years before outsiders arrived on a quest to find the monarch colony and inform the world of its existence.

 

At lower altitudes, Cerro Pelón’s forest is a jumble of alder and oak, cedar and pine. Along one curve above a dropoff, garrulous trogons call to each other from one side of the path to the other with a repeated call of coa. Coa is what people call trogons here.

“Does this place have a name?” I ask Ana. She’s pulled out her camera, trying get a shot of the pair of trogons rustling in the shadowy treetops overhead.

“La Leña del Delfino,” she answers, still squinting through her viewfinder.

Leña means firewood, and I haven’t met Delfino, but I wonder if he, like Cipriano, is still spitting mad about losing his land.

“It’s time for a new name. How about Sendero de los Coas? Trail of the Trogons. Before Delfino comes back for his wood.”

“Delfino’s dead,” she laughs and puts her camera away.

We always hear the trogons, but rarely catch sight of their brilliant red breasts. Continuing our walk, we raise plumes of fine yellow dust with each of our steps. Usually it’s not this dusty until March, but last summer’s rainy season was stingy.

We reach El Ranchito, another place named for something that is no longer there. This spot connects to the ravine that leads to the meadow just below the colony. Some days just a handful of butterflies sprinkle the fuzzy white flowers of the barra blanca. But other days, they rush down the ravine like a river, washing over you, dodging your body at the last second. It takes me back to how I felt when we first met: exquisitely present. On these days, we sit and watch their ebbs and flows for hours. Ana is a good guide in the way Joel is: you can feel her whole being getting lighter in their presence. Her smile, alternately nervous or sassy in other contexts, becomes beatific.

As February nears its end, we decide to take a hike on a Sunday to see the new colony location. After months of roosting above the meadow, the monarchs have finally relocated, halfway down the ravine. But when our group reaches the mouth of the ravine, there are no butterflies flying down it. Just paper wasps, striped like tigers, their long legs trailing behind them as they fly.

We always see signs of this parallel but far less charismatic migration that no one tracks, and this season their numbers are up. Wasps are better known as a monarch predator in the U.S., injecting their eggs into monarch chrysalises, slicing up caterpillars like steak or sawing the wings off an adult to carry the still living torso home to feed its young. But in Mexico, they just seem to be tagging along, joining the butterflies in their search for food and water.

Their potentially menacing presence makes it hard to appreciate the green tunnel and its tumbled boulders mottled in moss. All of our energy goes to avoiding the wasps covering the ground and filling the air. They congregate in the sunny spots, and I find myself pausing in the shade before making a determined dash through the swarm, quelling my rising panic by humming, hoping that my buzzing sound will make them think that I’m one of them.

The wasps are more likely to sting when disturbed while crawling on the ground, so Joel carries our nephew on his shoulders, above the danger zone. Our dogs are not so lucky. Usually overjoyed by hiking, they seem agitated, flinging their heads desperately at their flanks and chomping at the air.

Halfway up, we reach the forest guardians and my brother-in-law, Ranger Pato. They’re watering a rocky part of the trail to attract the butterflies. Every section Pato has soaked is covered with a living carpet of slowly opening and closing wings. Butterflies cannot live by nectar alone, and so these monarchs are “puddling,” sucking salt and minerals from the soil with long tubular tongues.

At first, Pato doesn’t want me to film him because this watering project is a secret. Our nonprofit has trouble getting permission to do things—the Reserve says ask the ejido, and the ejido says ask the Reserve, and then neither gives us an answer. We’ve stopped asking. There is a spring at the top of the ravine, and the guardians have diverted some water through a hidden hose to where the monarchs have formed their final colony.

Pretty soon, Pato’s pride outweighs his fear, and he lets me film. It makes sense, he says, to give the butterflies the resources they need here so they do not travel far, like down to the roadways where they can get hit by cars, as they have in years past. Better to keep them in the forest. Maybe this will keep them here for longer, he adds.

It doesn’t. A week later, by March 5, 2021, they have moved on from their roosts on Cerro Pelón. In seasons past, they stuck around until the spring equinox on the 21. It’s the earliest departure we have seen.

I am clutching my morning coffee and scrolling through emails when Pato pops by to hand over a memory card, the last of his images of the diminishing colony. In late February, the official survey of the overwintering population was released, and unsurprisingly, numbers this season are low. I ask Pato what he thinks.

“They say there were more monarchs in Sierra Chincua than on Cerro Pelón, and I just don’t believe it,” he says. Sierra Chincua is a monarch sanctuary on the Michoacán side of the Reserve, and historically their colony has always been smaller. Pato has visited the Michoacán sanctuaries, “and their trees are more spread out than on Cerro Pelón. So maybe the area of trees they are on is bigger, but the colonies themselves are a lot less dense.”

Many monarch biologists have also complained that density is not considered in these surveys, which means that the eastern monarch migration’s population decline could be even more dramatic than the WWF-Mexico annual surveys suggest.

I too feel frustration when I look at the bar graph and its accompanying press release. La Lagunita is not included in the count, which makes it look like that colony formation attempt didn’t even happen. Nor is there anything temporal in this line, like when they arrived or when they left or how often they shifted locations over the course of the winter. There’s nothing about their mortality rates, levels of flight activity, or the nectar sources available to them. Instead, all of the flux of the season is reduced to one bump on a bar graph of seemingly irrevocable decline.

The next time we receive an early morning visit from Pato, Joel and I are having breakfast. Distant forest fires burn on either end of the valley where we live. Whichever way the wind blows, smoke blots out the sun and erases the mountain ranges. I haven’t left the house in two days for fear breathing this haze, so I’m already feeling a bit trapped.

Pato pauses and bites his lip before announcing, “There’s more logging in La Lagunita. Demasiado.” He draws out each syllable of “too much.” They discovered six more felled trees in this section yesterday, bringing the total to 28 this year in this tiny area alone.

“They just left the trees there to dry. They’ll be back for them.”

“They’ll dry out fast in this weather,” Joel quips. When he left school after tenth grade, Joel worked briefly with illegal loggers, learning firsthand that dry wood is much lighter weight than green.

And these Nicolas Romero loggers are also teenagers, young men with young families and no prospects. They crept in after Pato and his coworkers had clocked out for the day. Even if they had been there, the rangers are unarmed and do not have the authority to give tickets or levy fines. Only the forest police can do that. And only the commissioner of an ejido or the director of the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve can call in the forest police. Commissioners do not want to turn in their constituents, and so the rangers report the logging to the Reserve.

But the forest police never come.

“What do we do?” Pato asks, eyes darting from me to Joel. It’s the most distraught I’ve seen him, so I know it must be bad.

We agree that Pato should call the director of the Reserve again and that Joel will message him as well. I’m scrolling through an imaginary Rolodex, knowing that the people with the most power in monarch conservation will also ignore me.

When Pato leaves, Joel blurts out, “Don’t be sad.”

I take this directive as an admission of his own sadness because I’m not yet crying.

But by the end of a helpless day of brush-offs and unanswered emails I am in tears. I don’t understand why people who have made a career of studying the monarch migration are unwilling to speak out on behalf of their forest. If Lincoln Brower was still alive, he would have drafted an op-ed to The New York Times by now. And then the forest police would come. That, I am told, is what it takes to get the authorities to act in Mexico. But no one of his stature is willing to make a statement. I can’t decide if it’s anger or sadness making my eyes sting.

When Joel comes home from a day of pouring floors in Ana’s house, he’s coated with a fine layer of dust and spackled with cement. I start blubbering, “It’s just that it’s that spot—that’s where Catalina and Ken found the colony. And now the butterflies will never come back there ever again.” After two years of searching, this pair of Mexican-American citizen scientists, Catalina Aguado Trail and Kenneth Brugger, encountered millions of monarchs in La Lagunita on Cerro Pelón and solved one of the biggest biological mysteries of the 20th century.

Normally, Joel gets impatient with this narrative of triumphant discovery by outsiders, interjecting, “Local people already knew, they just weren’t telling.” But today his eyes are moistening as well.

“See, you’re sad too.”

“What, no, I just have dust in my eyes.” He ploughs ahead with his denial. “You need to understand that this planet is very smart. We’ll be gone and there will still be butterflies.”

I don’t argue. It’s another one of our myriad differences: he’s optimistic about nature and pessimistic about people, while I’m worried that people have pushed nature to its breaking point but hopeful, all evidence to the contrary, that they can still be made to care enough to do something about it.

Before long, La Lagunita loses more trees. My ongoing efforts to rouse monarch butterfly conservation organizations into action are stonewalled or dismissed. The forest police visit Cerro Pelón a handful of times during the remainder of 2021. When they come, their trucks barrel through the settlements on the Michoacan side of the sanctuary, giving people time to call and warn the loggers in their families. No arrests are made.

When the monarch migration returns in late October, they no longer attempt to form a colony in La Lagunita. Instead, they settle in an adjacent grove called El Capulin, where younger trees offer them less protection from the elements. Mortality rates are high.

Numbers are up though, with butterflies covering four times as many trees on Cerro Pelón as the previous season. Meanwhile in California, more than a hundred times as many monarchs return to their overwintering grounds than in the previous year. “I told you so,” my husband gets to say. “You were so worried, and see, they’re fine.”

I wish I could believe him.