Four Wings and a Prayer (12 page)

It was one thing to know that there were millions of butterflies clinging to trees on the side of a ten-thousand-foot mountain in Mexico. It was quite another to know that one of those butterflies had come from the northern reaches of the United States, 1,750 miles away. The monarch had been tagged four months before Professor Urquhart found it. Here, at last, was conclusive proof that North American monarch butterflies migrated, and that they spent the winter alive, not dormant, clinging to fir trees, waiting out the cold.

Chapter 5

P
ROOF,
in science, is a dissembling concept. It suggests one thing, the truth, and means something else: conjecture. Granted, the conjecture is based on evidence, but conjecture of any kind is still an approximation, a best guess. So when Fred and Norah Urquhart happened upon the monarch butterfly tagged by Jim Gilbert and his friends, all they knew for sure was that a single monarch had gone from Minnesota to Mexico. About the other millions of butterflies in the air and in the trees and on the ground they could say nothing at all.

Soon enough, however, the evidence began to mount. More tags were found, and each one reinforced the supposition that the monarchs in the oyamel forests of Mexico had come from the United States and Canada. It was a guess, yes, but a guess that seemed less speculative as time went on. While
the Gilbert butterfly, and the hundreds of recoveries after it, revealed a consistent pattern of monarchs moving from north to south each fall, that was all they revealed. They did not prove that the butterflies reached the Transvolcanics intentionally, through directed flight. And they did not “prove” that there had been a migration. Migration is a story that seems to be true, that many hope is true (it’s heroic, exciting, against all odds), and that indeed may be true. But it may not be true, too.

I
F THE
U
RQUHARTS
acknowledged this uncertainty, they weren’t saying so. “We, as a dedicated group of Research Associates, can take credit … not only in following the migration but also in bringing this unique phenomenon to the attention of the public,” they wrote in their 1988
Insect Migration Report.
“So year after year, we delve even deeper and deeper into the life of the monarch butterfly.”

Accurate though that was then, it would not be so for much longer. It had been more than thirty years since the Urquharts recruited their first associates, and they were tired. By the early 1990s they had had enough.

“Fred decided that he wanted to slow down a bit,” recalled Don Davis, their most avid helper. “They were in their eighties and were still getting twelve thousand pieces of mail a year. I agreed that the project should decline, but I still wanted to tag. They did not support this at the time. It was their project, and they ran it; if they said tagging was over, it was over. So after working together for twenty-seven years or so, our contact basically ended.”

Tagging itself, however, did not end. Davis had his own labels printed up, as did a few other research associates, and
continued to carry on. While some of these tags were recovered in Mexico, it was a limited and idiosyncratic effort at best. The necessary populism of the Insect Migration Association, which had drawn together thousands of people who had little in common but an interest in the most common of butterflies, was gone. And with it went the spirit of the effort, the basic ecology of people scattered across the map recognizing, through a small insect, their relation to one another, and to the land, and to the elements.

L
INCOLN
B
ROWER, TOO,
had his own tags printed, not to continue the work of the Urquharts but to improve upon it. Brower was unimpressed by the kind of science the Urquharts had been practicing with their research associates. It was too fuzzy, he thought, and too impressionistic, to be of much value. That was when he was being generous about it. When he was not, which was often, he considered it an “amateurish, self-serving approach to biology that isn’t science.”

But Brower, more than anyone one else, knew that this approach was what had always distinguished monarch research and had, in fact, advanced it. Perhaps because they were seen in large groups, or perhaps because they moved over a sizable territory, monarch butterflies had caught the attention of amateur naturalists—direct heirs to the English tradition of field studies—for generations. Indeed, as Lincoln Brower noted in a monograph written in 1994, “the story of the monarch butterfly is a result of the combined observations of professional and amateur lepidopterists over more than a century.”

It began with Charles Riley, an Englishman who emigrated
to the United States in the nineteenth century and served for years as the official entomologist of Missouri. Like Fred Urquhart, Riley relied on field observers, in his case randomly dispersed across the state, to supplement his own observations. Monarchs were of particular interest. Not only did they appear to congregate, they seemed to move in a consistent way across the Midwest. As Brower told it, “The accumulation of anecdotal notes of monarch swarms from the prairie across the Great Lake States to New England, supplemented by frequent newspaper and signal officer reports of swarms passing over Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, and Texas, finally convinced Riley that the monarch indeed performs a bird-like fall migration.” And that wasn’t all. Riley also proposed that the butterflies’ likely destination was the southern timber forests. A century later, when Fred Urquhart picked up Jim Gilbert’s butterfly, Riley was shown to be right.

Anecdotal science may not have been good science, may not have been science at all, but it yielded interesting questions, and in some instances it led to crucial answers. But when the Urquharts were getting out of the business, it seemed that a whole tradition was ending. Monarch biology was becoming the province of academics. Lincoln Brower, for one, was working on sophisticated methods of chemical ecology. And while Bill Calvert was off in the woods making field notes, he was no amateur, either. In Mexico he was known as
Doctor
Calvert. Even Robert Michael Pyle, the lepidopterist who, more than anyone, was able to introduce laypeople to the beauty and the natural history of butterflies through his Audubon field guides, though unaffiliated with any university, had the distinction of a doctorate from Yale.

Enter Chip Taylor—Dr. Orley Taylor—of the University
of Kansas, a man who would look like Father Christmas if Father Christmas wore crisp blue oxford shirts and khaki pants and snacked on bee pollen. And if his workshop were crowded with amber jars of aminoacetic acid and hexane and syringes and microscopes and caged butterflies and “Far Side” cartoons (“Ten Reasons to become an entomologist: number three: Only about a billion species to worry about”) and a window box crawling with bees, all attended by a dozen elves who looked remarkably like midwestern college kids. Taylor was professor of biology and an expert on “killer” bees. But in the summer of 1992, after nearly twenty years of bee research, he was looking to move in another direction. “I was exploring several options when Brad Williamson, a high school biology teacher from Kansas City, showed up, and we began discussing monarchs,” Taylor recalled. “The Urquhart program was fading, and it didn’t appear that the Urquharts would ever summarize their data—or share them. We discussed initiating a tagging program and Brad insisted we had to do it differently—develop a broader base and involve students. I was a bit skeptical, but the idea appealed to the educator in me and we initiated a tagging program with our own money and some I had set aside from an income account maintained with the endowment association. I didn’t envision Monarch Watch when I started—or becoming a monarch researcher or expert myself.” But that was what happened.

O
N THE WALL
of a narrow office on the seventh floor of Haworth Hall at the University of Kansas was a map of North America that looked like a rendering of long- and short-haul
trucking routes. Scores of colored lines connect places like Duluth, Minnesota, and Cedar Rapids, Iowa; Olathe, Kansas, and Gun Barrel, Texas; New Orleans, Louisiana, and El Rosario, Mexico; and Orion, Illinois, and Abilene, Texas. The one line that wasn’t there—not in visible ink, at least—joins Toronto, Canada, to Lawrence, Kansas: Fred Urquhart’s hometown to Chip Taylor’s. This poster, though formally titled “Forty Years of Monarch Recoveries,” was also a map of Chip Taylor’s life for nearly a decade. It showed just how much of a monarch researcher he had unwittingly become.

In the summer of 1992, though, Taylor was still basically a bee man, and a little too shy to get in touch with the Urquharts. “Their summaries were getting shorter each season,” he said, “and nothing new was being generated, and no summaries of the overall data seemed imminent. In fact, when Fred and Norah stopped their program, Fred was widely quoted as saying nothing had been or could be learned from the recoveries in the U.S. The data say otherwise. Fred simply didn’t have the insight, or collaborators who did, to sort the data to reveal the patterns therein.” Taylor and Williamson issued press releases that appeared in newspapers from Minnesota to Texas, recruiting volunteers. They were interested less in establishing that monarchs from the North ended up in Mexico than in finding the routes and the azimuths by which they got there.

Once the newspaper articles came out, the phones began to ring in Haworth Hall. Most volunteers were schoolteachers looking to use monarchs in their classrooms, but there were unaffiliated individuals as well. Monarch Watch—the name Taylor and Williamson gave to their project—took off in ways that neither man had foreseen. In its first year a few
thousand butterflies were tagged; five years later the number approached a hundred thousand. By then actual, real, crucial, and sometimes anecdotal evidence about flyways, flight and weather patterns, and endurance had been added by Taylor’s amateur minions to the scientific record.

In this effort, however, unlike most scientific endeavors, the outcome was less critical than the process. Taylor was tired of teaching bright university students who could answer the questions put to them on standardized tests but had no idea how those questions had been formulated in the first place. He wanted a project that was unscripted, that would not merely engage young people but inspire them to think scientifically. “All I’m doing is trying to provide a building block,” Taylor said one day as he walked through the West Campus greenhouse checking his milkweed seedlings. There were hundreds of them. “When I was thirteen I decided honeybees were very interesting and I was going to learn everything about them. I badgered my mother to take me to the library and I got out all the books on bees and read them over and over again. I’ve got passion in my soul, and that’s what I’m trying to inspire with Monarch Watch. Passion. That’s why I like beekeepers. They’re passionate.”

Outside the greenhouse monarchs were chasing one another and nectaring on purple thistle and basking in the sun. There were pearl crescents and buckeyes and cloudless sulfurs, too, and cabbage whites and viceroys. As Taylor walked through the field, all manner of insect life buzzed around him, or lit on his shirt, as if he were Saint Francis of the invertebrates. He picked a honeybee off an aster and held it to my ear. I drew away, taking one large step backward. Taylor laughed and turned it over. “It’s a male,” he said. “No stinger.” Two paces later he
stopped and knelt by a small, leafy cottonwood and beckoned me over. “See that?” he said. No, I didn’t. “Look at the underside of the leaf,” he instructed. He turned it over and there was a nearly microscopic pearl—the egg of a viceroy butterfly. This might have been an entomological parlor trick, but I was impressed nonetheless. “How did you know it would be there?” I asked dumbly. “Because when I was twelve I taught myself which butterflies lay eggs on which plants,” Taylor said. “Viceroys prefer small, young cottonwoods.” “Oh,” I said, almost walking into a trap laid by the menacing (I thought) orb weaver spider that was presiding over two dead monarchs suspended from her web, shrouded in white silk like bodies ready for burial.

The greenhouse milkweed was necessary for one of Monarch Watch’s sideline—and somewhat controversial—businesses, sending larvae to schools and individuals eager to raise their own caterpillars and watch them transform themselves into butterflies. Controversial because the larvae, which were also being raised in the West Campus greenhouse, were being shipped all over the country to be released into the wild population, where they posed the danger of infusing strange or nonadapted genes into a local population or causing bacterial infections. Although thousands went out the door of Haworth Hall each year, Taylor was convinced that they were not statistically significant (“Nevertheless,” he urged members of Monarch Watch, “we should be cautious and under no conditions should we release diseased monarchs into the natural population”). In any case, Taylor understood that dominion, even dominion over a small insect, could be a route to passion: maybe some of the people who raised these monarchs would care enough about their fate to learn more about the Mexican preserves or about pesticide use in the United
States or about the use of transgenic crops. Maybe some of them would become field biologists themselves, or zoologists, or ecologists. Taylor saw himself as a teacher, a mentor, an inspiration. The caterpillars were essential.