The Monarchs of El Rosario

by Turk Pipkin

(Originally appeared in Texas Monthly)

One sunny fall day in West Texas, when I was a foolish boy, I caught hundreds of monarch butterflies and released them in my sisters' bedroom where they landed in great masses on the flowered curtains. The glorious visual impact of this sight was not lost on my mother who offered to tan my hide if I didn't release each and every one so they could continue on their journey. Opening the window and removing the screen, we watched the butterflies wing their way south. “Where in the world,” we wondered, “were they going?”

Thirty years later, with my arms open wide, a dozen monarchs landed on my jacket and hat as if I were those flowered curtains, and my question was finally answered. Then there was a sudden rustle in the tree above and me and I looked up to see an explosion of orange and black as thousands of butterflies took to flight in the warming rays of the morning sun. All around me giant fir trees were literally covered in so many hundreds of thousands of butterflies that no green could be seen on the strong branches bending towards the ground, branches that sometimes break from the weight of the monarchs. Everywhere I looked were butterflies and more butterflies, and beyond that, there were even more. I gasped to catch my breath, not from the steep climb or the ten thousand foot elevation, but from the sheer exhilaration of so much natural beauty.

As this story reaches Texas Monthly readers, over 100 million monarch butteflies are gathered at their over-wintering sites in the mountains just a three hour drive west of Mexico City. The El Rosario butterfly sanctuary – one of five government owned preserves in the area and the only one open to the public – can be easily visited in a three day weekend from Texas. And the best time to go is mid-February to mid-March when the butterflies mass in their densest congregations and when you may get to see their spectacular mating ceremony, pairs of butterflies coupled in mid-air, the females’ wings folded as she dangles beneath the soaring male.

By the end of March, the butterflies depart on their journey north, following a bountiful feast of flowers for distances hard to imagine for such frail creatures. A hundred miles a day is not uncommon; one tagged monarch covered 286 miles in a 24 hour period. Along their way the females lay their eggs, primarily on milkweed plants which provide a source of food for the rapidly growing caterpillar larvae.

One of the main keys to the Monarch's survival is the digitalis-like poison – the same deadly elixir favored by ancient Romans bent on murder or suicide – which occurs naturally in many varieties of milkweed. The butterfly larvae, immune to the toxin, accumulate it in their bodies so that Blue Jays and most other predators who eat them become ill and vomit repeatedly.

A month after the eggs are layed, a fully developed monarch emerges from its chrysalis and continues the migration north. Fanning out over the eastern two thirds of the U.S., from the slopes of the Rocky Mountains to the canyons of Wall Street, their great migration will carry many of them deep into Canada before shorter days and cooler temperatures send them hurrying south again. In all, three to five generations occur each year between the butterflies which leave the over-wintering sites in the spring and those that return in the fall, a miraculous journey repeated annually for perhaps the past 40,000 years and one that defies any definite scientific explanation. One unproven theory concerning this pinpoint accuracy is that, like some birds, the monarchs are sensitive to magnetism, and are guided towards large iron ore deposits in these mountains.

There are several package tours to the area but I found it a surprisingly easy trip to make on my own. Flying into Mexico City I rented a car, and headed west on Highway 15, taking the multi-lane toll road ("Cuota") to Toluca for 20 pesos ($7). On the way into Toluca I stopped to look at the wonderfully huge statue of Emiliano Zapata astride a mountainous bronze horse, and then I took the bypass around the south side of the city. On your return you may want to drive straight through town in order to shop at the fine government-run crafts shop, CASART, which has a variety of reasonably priced, high-quality goods from all over the country. On Fridays, Toluca also has a crowded but colorful Indian market.

It's a beautiful one hour drive through wooded mountains from Toluca to Zitacuaro, a town of 60,000, but whether that number refers to people or speed bumps, I wouldn’t venture to guess. Ten miles outside of Zitacuaro – near the new Villa Monarca Inn – a well-marked right-hand turn will take you up the flower-covered Angangueo gorge towards the alpine towns of Ocampo and Angangueo, both at the base of the El Rosario butterfly reserve, known officially as the Reserva Mariposa Monarca Santuario Sierra el Campanara.

The existence of the preserves is owed in part to the work of the Mexican conservation group Monarca, A.C. who, in response to extensive slash and burn logging which was destroying essential butterfly habitat, prodded the government to prohibit all logging and agricultural development in an area of 11,000 acres. Another 28,000 acres of buffer zones also now have development restrictions and, most importantly, the Ministry of Ecology has purchased outright 2,000 acres of the prime over-wintering sites.

A parallel strategy has been to find alternate sources of income for local residents: expansion of commercial chrysanthemum growing, improving yields of existing farmland, and tourism. Last year, 48,000 visitors paid ten pesos each (just over three dollars) to visit El Rosario. "There is no solid evidence that tourists are harmful to the monarchs.” says Austinite Dr. William Calvert, who discovered many of the butterflies over-wintering sites in 1975. “It's habitat destruction that harms the butterflies."

I chose to stay in the heart of butterfly country, the Hotel Don Bruno in the mining town of Angangueo, a lovely and spotless inn with nary a bit of heat in the icy rooms (unless you've had the foresight to call ahead by three weeks and reserved a room with a fireplace). The food was only so-so, but the company was great as no one wanted to talk about anything but butterflies.

On the first night of my visit the hotel was nearly full with an IMAX film crew. IMAX is a special camera process which uses a 65 mm film and a negative nine times the size of regular 35mm. The film's cinematographer, Alex Phillips who shot many films in Mexico for legendary director John Huston, told me they had shots which would fill the entire 65' x 90' screen with butterflies. New Yorker Lorena Parlee, who was directing the film for the new IMAX theater at the children's museum in Mexico City, said, "The film is supposed to be about all of Mexico, but after seeing the butterflies, we may rethink the rest."

Most tourists hire a four wheel drive vehicle and driver in Angangueo to carry them up the mountain to El Rosario. The cost – for one to ten passengers is about $40. Being contrary to set travel itineraries, I took the unescorted route, stopping in Ocampo at the government office in charge of protecting the Monarchs, the Procuraduria Federal De Proteccion Al Ambiente, where one of the directors, Señor Francisco Zapién Prado, assured me that preservation of the butterflies now causes minimal economic problems for the area, that ejidos and communales are replanting trees all over the mountains, and third, that I could probably make the unpaved road to El Rosario from Ocampo in my rented car.

As I left pavement and eased onto an unlikely pot-holed alley on the edge of town, two women waved at me and asked for a ride. They were Gina and Rosalinda, on their way to the primary school in the village of El Rosario where they are teachers. For half an hour I edged the car slowly up the beautiful mountain, driving through water on several crystal clear stream crossings with long log footbridges off to the side for those walking. On one of the bridges, a very old man with an immense load of kindling on his back, was crossing with slow but steady steps.

Gina and I chatted in my broken Spanish while from the back seat Rosalinda sang happy songs about her son Chuy who was doing well in Morelia, with a good, good job and about to marry a beautiful girl. I tried to ask Gina if she had heard of an Indian legend about a young hunter who was instructed by a medicine man to catch the first monarch of the summer and rub the gold dust from its wings on his chest to become as swift and light as the butterfly, but I found that my Spanish was not up to the story. She did tell me, however, that as a child she’d heard that the butterflies, passing through the lower valleys around All Saints’ Day, were said to be the souls of dead children on their journey to heaven.

Just outside of El Rosario we were forced to a halt by a heavy rope stretched across the road. I rolled down my window and a man trying his best to look official walked over and demanded ten pesos, about $3, to pass. I was about to pay when Rosalinda hopped out of the back seat, strode up to the man and read him the riot act in Spanish and an Indian dialect I couldn't identify. Then she got back in the car, the rope was lowered, and we passed without paying. "Bandidos!” she said with disgust.

Dropping the ladies at the school I continued bouncing up the rocky road to the parking lot at the sanctuary. A number of vendors’ shacks line both sides of the path to the entrance, a veritable gauntlet of embroidered, painted, and carved butterfly memorabilia, and some very tasty pork tacos. Well fed at last, I paid my ten pesos admission and was assigned an enthusiastic and knowledgeable guide named Jaimé. Though he did not speak English, on weekends there are generally guides who do. After signing in the daily log book and taking a cursory look at the small cabin which serves as headquarters and information center, Jaimé and I began to climb up a well-worn path, first through thick stands of pines (which the monarchs do not care for) and then beneath a canopy of Oyamel, the fir tree preferred by most choosy butterflies. Thankfully, steps have been cut into the steep path, though they do nothing to ease the sudden ache of heavy climbing at the thin air of 10,000 feet.

Not far up the hill Jaimé picked up a butterfly that had fallen to the ground and frozen nearly stiff. "Esta muerto?" I asked. "No." my guide answered. "Frio." Hoping to warm the nearly frozen monarch, I cupped it gently in my hand and we started back up the hill.

By the way, it is a wives’ tale that touching or rubbing some of the dust from the monarchs’ wings will kill them. Lepidopterists tag the butterflies by rubbing off some of the tiny scales and adhering a tag to the edge of the wing. These tagging programs have shown us that additional threats to the monarchs include automobiles, pesticides which poison the water they drink, and herbicides which indiscriminately destroy both the milkweed on which they are born and many other flowers which supply their nectar. If you want to help the monarchs, plant wildflower mixes containing milkweed seeds.

As the first visitors up the mountain that morning, we came across literally hundreds of butterflies in the path, lifting most of them and placing them onto the adjacent shrubbery and dense flowers. Meanwhile that first monarch in my hand was beginning to stir.

The problem with clear-cutting or even thinning the dense forests here is that the butterflies depend upon the heavy cover to protect them from the cold. With four million butterflies per acre, a change of even a few degrees can be disastrous. A similar threat exists from uncontrolled trampling of the undergrowth by over anxious tourists. If a butterfly falls to the ground on a cold night, it must climb back onto low growing flowers or bushes to escape the coldest air at the ground. If these plants are trampled flat, butterflies on the ground have little or no chance of survival, which is why all visitors at El Rosario must stay on the clearly marked path.

Jaime showed me how to tell the males – with a distinct black dot on each anterior wing – from the females – with no dots and a shorter body (while they are not pregnant). As we moved on, I begin to see large trees that seemed to have many frozen or dead branches. On closer inspection I realized that they were not dead needles but the brown underside of thousands of wings. Like the butterflies, we had arrived.

The monarch's wings are like miniature solar collectors, and as the sun broke over the mountain and lit up the trees in gold and black, the butterflies warmed and began to fill the sky with their glorious flight. With one last warm breath on the monarch that I carried up the mountain, I lofted him into the air and he flew up into a blue sky that was ablaze in color.

With my heart greatly bolstered but my legs feeling weak, we finally started down the mountain. The butterflies were also beginning to move down the slopes to visit the wildflowers below. As we neared the bottom of the trail, I paused to listen to the whisper of thousands of butterfly wings which harmonized with the gurgling of a small, clear creek into a single indistinguishable sound; not water, not insect, but the sweet harmonious music of life.

Sanborn's Travel (210-682-9872): $460/person for six days with travel in first class motor coaches. February and March.

Mita Butler Hunt Travel (512-458-6554): $1,350/person double occupancy including airfare, hotels and tour director Bill Calvert’s vast knowledge about the monarchs. February 19 - 23.

The Travel Institute (1-800-322-4888) $160/person (minimum of five people) for custom tours from the Mexico City airport led by former archaeologist/turned travel director Don Patterson.

Hotel Don Bruno in Angangueo 011-52 (725) 8-00-26

Villa Monarca Inn on Highway 15 (bungalows with fireplaces)

Hotel Balneario (in a deciduous forest near the town of Jungapeo where the main holiday festival is held in mid-March)