3/6/2005. The miraculous monarch

Our guide was cutting his eyes at me quizzically. To reassure him, I explained that the tears on my face were simply due to the emotion I felt confronted with something so beautiful. After 4 hours on a steep road, another 40 minutes climbing on horseback, and a half hour's hike on foot, suddenly the air was full of butterflies. The more I looked about me, the more of them I saw...silently floating, seeming to sail on the sunbeams that filtered down through the branches of tall pines. Alighting on bits of undergrowth, or fallen branches. Clinging to the branches of the pines like holiday ornaments. Or quietly fluttering their last on the thick needle litter of the ground.



The butterflies were all monarchs, for we were in the Sanctuario Mariposa Monarca, the preserve created in the mountains of western Mexico to protect the overwintering grounds of North America's monarch butterflies. It was midafternoon between Christmas and New Year, and even at this southern latitude, the sun was riding low in the sky, cutting long beams through the forest and backlighting the butterflies.




The air was chilly, for not only were we just a few days past the winter solstice, but we were at an altitude of nearly 10,000 feet. We buttoned up our jackets as we continued up the trail through ever-thickening clouds of butterflies. The chill was beginning to drive the butterflies to their overnight roosts, where they group together for warmth in the branches of the pines like clusters of enormous grapes. The tips of many of the branches were so covered with butterflies that they drooped under their weight. Imagine! "Light as a butterfly," we like to say. Yet here there was such a concentration of them that trees could be said to groan under their weight. (Because --and rightfully so--one is not allowed to approach too closely these trees, these remarkable clusters are very hard to photograph. But in the photo below right, the brownish orange blobs on the pine branches are each clusters of hundreds of butterflies.)



At the pinnacle of the trail, we tarried for a good half hour, steeping ourselves in the wonder of this sight. The wings of deceased butterflies swirled on the ground around our feet. We were not alone. Perhaps twenty other tourists--all Mexican--were around us, yet we were all--even the small children--quiet with awe at this spectacle. Awe, and not a little reverence.




I felt as if I couldn't get enough of what I was seeing, so fixed on the butterflies that I hardly heard the people around me. Finally, the sun lowering against the horizon, and the sudden drop in temperature, reminded us of the long hike down and the much longer drive back into Morelia. Denis and the guide started heading down. I was just starting to follow them when a monarch settled on my hand.

I thought of all the butterfly gardens I had designed and planted during my career as a landscape designer, of all the talks I'd given on the intricacies of butterfly gardening, of all the milkweeds (preferred food and nectar plant of monarchs) that I'd planted during my life. My monarch visitor stayed with me for several minutes, crawling around my hand comfortably, even when I brought my hand closer to my face for a better look. Of course, it was probably attracted to the warm beacon of my body in the chilly air. But I felt as if I'd been singled out for purely for benediction.

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