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 Editorials | Environmental | August 2006 
Clouds of Monarch Butterflies Descend on Mexico Sanctuaries
 Judy Wiley - McClatchy Newspapers
| | "Las mariposas" - the butterflies - arrive in Mexico's heartland, the Sierra Madre in the state of Michoacan, every November. |
Angangueo, Michoacan, Mexico - They travel thousands of miles, unerringly, every year between Canada and Mexico. No one knows how they find their way.
"Las mariposas" - the butterflies - come by the millions. They arrive in Mexico's heartland, the Sierra Madre in the state of Michoacan, every November. Five sanctuaries are established to protect them and to let visitors see the miracle of the monarchs.
Guide Andres Orosco and I start the three-hour drive from Morelia to Santuario El Rosario near Angangueo early in the morning.
Rosario is the original butterfly sanctuary in Mexico, and the largest. The Mexican government in 1986 established two zones that form a Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve - protected from logging and development - although Rosario was considered a sanctuary before that.
The mountains of Michoacan have what the monarchs need: The black-and-orange insects cluster on oyamel pines in the remote mountains, and the microclimate in the area provides just the right temperature and moisture.
Indians in the area before Columbus arrived depicted butterflies in their drawings, according to "Mexico: Charming Inns and Itineraries," by Karen Brown. The wintering grounds were first noted by scientists in the 1970s, when a Canadian zoologist rediscovered the spot.
In 2001, the government and private sources set aside millions of dollars for a fund called the Monarch Trust to pay local residents to stop cutting down the trees, according to a Reuters report. Today, some of the farmers make their living off tourism, as guides.
Tourists have plenty to see in Michoacan before they get to Angangueo. Just outside Morelia, for example, one town sells fresh, round loaves of Mexican bread so close you could touch them from the car.
In another, San Lucas Pio, outdoor vendors sell baskets woven using ancestral techniques. The town is one of many in the area where artisans create goods made there for centuries. Paracho is a guitar town, and in Santa Clara del Cobere, coppersmiths create jewelry, pots and more.
Between villages, the roadsides are lined with the cornfields of subsistence farmers and "barbacoa" stands.
We stop near Querendaro to eat at one called Borrego Feliz - Happy Sheep. I'm not so sure about that, because we are eating mutton, and I'm more than a little worried about the big, greasy-looking chunks of it that are being sliced as we pay for the meal.
But I could have relaxed.
The "barbacoa" - sprinkled with lime, cilantro and onion and served with chile arbol - is amazing - delicate and spicy at once. Nothing like the heavy flavors I'd expected. Orosco says 20 different kinds of chiles are grown in the area.
This is a family enterprise. The father is slicing the mutton, which Orosco says was raised by the family and butchered, then buried for about a day in an underground cooking pit piled with maguey cactus for fuel. Two or three daughters are mixing masa (ground from corn he says they probably grew) into tortillas they cook on a charcoal-fired griddle.
As we drive on toward the sanctuary, Orosco hits the gas and squeals the tires around every curve, and there are a lot of them. Luckily, his spiel about the monarchs helps distract me from his driving.
The insects leave Canada in September and arrive at their winter homes in Mexico around Nov. 2, the Day of the Dead. They fly about 2,500 miles, resting in trees by night. Some 40 million come to Santuario Rosario alone.
"They come here to die," Orosco says. The males live only 72 hours after mating. The females live on to lay eggs as they travel back toward the north. A monarch butterfly's total life span is nine months at the longest.
Subsequent generations continue traveling north, reproducing and then dying; the process repeats several times along the way. Several generations later, new offspring make the trip from Canada to Mexico.
One theory is that the butterflies navigate by smell, Orosco says. But no one really knows how they find the way. The route is the same every year.
Blue-and-white signs showing the way to the "santuario" start to appear as we get closer. The streets narrow in the towns with their central cathedrals and white-walled buildings. "Campesinos," their hats hanging down their backs, trudge down the road, and skinny cows stare out at the cars. Homemade altars stand near the road, sometimes alone, sometimes near houses.
Finally, we are in Angangueo. People are dressed in their best on this Sunday afternoon. Every older woman is wrapped up in a rebozo (shawl) despite the unseasonably warm February weather. At the santuario, the whole enterprise looks a lot more touristy than I'd expected. There is a charge to use the restroom, for starters. A ticket to enter the sanctuary costs about $2.75.
Orosco immediately starts marching up the path, which is steep and lined with food vendors. A little farther up, when I stop to gasp for breath, the selling begins in earnest. Booths are filled with butterfly mugs, butterfly lunch pails, butterfly paperweights, all the kinds of trinkets Americans expect from border Mexico. Until now, I hadn't seen it here in the interior.
I can't pay much attention to this annoyance, because the real butterflies have begun to drift down the mountainside, just a few here and there, flapping around the hordes of people marching up to see the colonies.
As the climb grows steeper, the crowd gets thicker, and so do the flocks of butterflies. After we've passed the booths, we begin to see hundreds at a time, often resting at places where water has collected.
They alight on bushes right beside us sometimes brushing our wrists and faces with their wings and thin black legs. Kids are kneeling beside a flock of them on a creek bed, nudging them onto their hands and giggling.
Orosco says the black lines on their wings are the butterflies' thermometers. When they get too cold, they huddle together for warmth.
He outwalks me on the path - it takes about an hour to reach the top - but when I finally catch up, he urges me to climb a little higher, where the colonies are easier to see.
They are not what I expected. Still distant, high up in the firs, they hang in clusters. They look like orangey infestations from here. Well, after all, they are insects.
Andres says the migration was viewed by the indigenous peoples of Mexico as a plague. The Spaniards, he says, thought the butterflies were people's souls.
We stop to eat again on the way down, at a stand run by a woman named Isabel Valencia Hernandez. She greets Orosco, a regular customer, and we order something I thought was strange, flat fish when I saw it on the way up. They are actually blue corn tortillas stuffed with cheese and served with spicy salsa. And they're good.
We are ready to leave, and the butterflies soon will be, too. The monarchs make the long journey back to Canada in early March. They will repeat the cycle again, their internal road map still a mystery to us.
KEY FACTS ABOUT MONARCH BUTTERFLIES
• No other butterfly flies as far - 2,500-3,000 miles - to migrate.
• Monarchs eat milkweed flowers and other plants.
• Science's best guess as to how the monarchs find their migration route is that it could have something to do with the position of the sun, polarization of the sun's rays and the Earth's magnetic field.
• Monarchs have an elaborate mating ceremony. Males produce pheromones and sprinkle a female with them to start the attraction.
• Males mate with as many as three females, and then die.
Plenty of Web sites provide information about the migration, and some are even set up for migration tracking as projects for classes or families. Try: www.pgmonarchs.org; www.monarchwatch.org; www.learner.org; www.pbs.org.
Sources: www.pgmonarchs.org and www.monarchwatch.org
IF YOU GO
Central Mexico has so much to offer that it's worth starting to plan a trip now, to catch the butterflies November through March.
The monarchs are far from the only attraction in the area. A great trip would include a day or two in Morelia, a beautiful colonial city; another couple of days in Patzcuaro, where artisans from all over the region sell their work on weekends and the Day of the Dead celebration is famous; and a day visiting the butterflies.
Getting there:
• Continental Airlines flies directly to Morelia from Houston. A flight in early November runs around $396 round-trip from Dallas/Fort Worth Airport.
Staying:
• Good hotels are available in both cities. I've tried two boutique hotels - Villa Montana in Morelia and La Mansion de los Suenos in Patzcuaro - that offered great food and rooms. To learn more about them, go to www.mexicoboutiquehotels.com
• Karen Brown's guidebook "Mexico: Charming Inns and Itineraries" says hotels are available in Angangueo and Zitacuaro - she recommends Rancho San Cayetano in Zitacuaro (www.ranchosancayetano.com). I was not able to check it out, but it also is highlighted in a Treasures of Michoacan guide produced by the Mexican government.
Tours:
• We booked our tour through the concierge at Villa Montana. The cost is $80 per person or about $150 per car (you'll have to pay $150 if you go alone), and a recent check of the Web site shows a two-person minimum. Other tours are available online, but we can't vouch for them.
• The second sanctuary open to the public is Chincua, which is also reached by car through Angangueo and then on horseback. Again, using your hotel to book the tour is a good idea, or look at Brown's guidebook for a more detailed resource. |
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