Part 3 (1/2)

”This whole monarch thing is so weird,” Perez said one afternoon in Lawrence, having driven in from Tucson, where she was completing a second postdoc (on ants), to consult with Taylor, with whom she continued to collaborate on monarchs. ”No one ever asks me about my dissertation, ever. Do you want to know the t.i.tle? It's 'The Risk-Sensitive Foraging Behavior of Carpenter Bees.' So then I work in this lab for a few months and boom, everyone is interested in what I'm doing. You just say the words monarch b.u.t.terfly, and people are interested.”

Perez, though, was being modest. She said the words monarch b.u.t.terfly and people listened because she happened to say them to the three million listeners of National Public Radio. It was May 1997, and she was standing in a field in Kansas, releasing b.u.t.terflies and then running after them with a compa.s.s as the reporter ran after her with a microphone. Perez was conducting a clock-s.h.i.+fting experiment. Under Chip Taylor's guidance, she had collected a number of migrating monarchs and kept them in the lab for nearly two weeks, changing the light and dark cycles to confuse them into believing they were in a different time zone-Hawaii's, by my calculation. Perez had two control groups as well. One was kept in the lab without being clock-s.h.i.+fted; the other consisted of migrants captured in the wild and kept outdoors.

The question Perez and Taylor were asking was quite simple: Do migrating monarch b.u.t.terflies use the sun to guide them to their winter homes? To find out, Perez released the b.u.t.terflies one at a time and ran after them till they were out of sight, recording the way they were headed. The heading-the direction in which the monarch's body was pointing, even if it was being buffeted sideways or backward by the wind-was key, since routine vanis.h.i.+ng bearings had proved deceptive. Captive monarchs, especially those with low body temperatures, were notoriously weak fliers. They tried to go a certain way but were not powerful enough to succeed.

”When you take vanis.h.i.+ng bearings, you get false information,” Perez said. ”It can't accommodate the wind. Basically you're getting wind direction. The body orientation and the vanis.h.i.+ng bearings were markedly different, so I started to record the body orientation-the heading-as well, and when I did, some patterns started to show up. The vanis.h.i.+ng bearings of the animals in the wild were what we expected, but the vanis.h.i.+ng bearings of the b.u.t.terflies we had cooled down in storage were all over the place. But their headings were all the same. Once I realized this, I started to do orientation studies looking at headings, not at vanis.h.i.+ng bearings.”

Once Perez began to do this, the results were pretty stunning. It was midafternoon on a sunny day in an open field on the Lawrence campus. She released the control monarchs. They flew in the predicted south-southwesterly direction, the direction of the Mexican overwintering sites. So far, so good. Then she began releasing the clock-s.h.i.+fted b.u.t.terflies, and one by one they began to head west-northwest. They behaved, in other words, as if it were nine in the morning. To Taylor's question ”Do monarch b.u.t.terflies use the sun to orient themselves?” Perez's data seemed to chorus a resounding ”Yes!”

”The week the sun-compa.s.s story aired on NPR, a guy I didn't know showed up in my lab in Tucson wearing a suit and tie,” Perez said. ”He said he was working on some kind of nanoplane for some agency in Was.h.i.+ngton and he thought this biological information might be applicable. I guess he thought the sun compa.s.s was the tip of the iceberg, but in fact as far as I was concerned it was the whole iceberg.

”A lot of people didn't believe we were getting these results, because they weren't able to get them. They said it was impossible. But I didn't know it was impossible, so I did it.”

Adrian Wenner was one of these. A professor emeritus of natural history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Wenner was unconvinced by Sandra Perez's results. To anyone familiar with the monarch world, this was not surprising. Wenner was a professional naysayer, a gadfly and critic, the one person least likely to be impressed by anyone's data. This negativity wasn't personal, and it wasn't spurious. Wenner was a thoughtful, courteous man-and he was smart, endowed with the kind of searing intelligence that one hopes not to cross. Wenner took one look at the clock-s.h.i.+fting experiment and began to tick off its flaws. At first he said nothing, though it disturbed him to see the experiment written up in Nature, which he had thought had more exacting standards. But when the Los Angeles Times picked up the story, that was too close. Wenner began openly to debunk the experiment, arguing that it was not statistically significant, that the statistical a.n.a.lysis was flawed, and that the whole enterprise was biased because Perez ”knew” in which direction migrating monarchs were ”supposed” to move, knowledge that might have influenced her outcomes.

”It seems to me that we keep 'getting the cart in front of the horse,' ” Wenner wrote to Chip Taylor shortly after the L.A. Times piece ran, ”letting theory rather than evidence drive interpretation.” Wenner also took the data and put them through other statistical a.n.a.lyses and came up with nothing: these tests did not show the data to be statistically significant. In other words, if these tests had been subst.i.tuted for the one Perez had used, the conclusion would have been contrary to hers. This was another complaint of Wenner's: if data were a.n.a.lyzed in three different ways and only one of those tests indicated significance, the scientist was free to discard the results of the two ”failed” tests. Anything that did not support the narrative could be ignored.

”Striving to find out what animals really do in nature is a far more n.o.ble pursuit than trying to 'prove' that they do what we might wish them to do,” Adrian Wenner wrote in a memo dated September 25, 1997, and addressed to ”Those Interested in Monarch b.u.t.terfly Biology.” Although nominally commenting on the sun-compa.s.s experiment, Wenner was registering a much larger complaint. He did not accept the conventional wisdom; he did not believe that monarch b.u.t.terflies migrated. He knew that the eastern population moved southward in the fall. He knew that much of the western population moved toward the coast at around the same time. But he refused to accept that in either case the movement was intentional. Intent, he believed, was a human attribute. So was wanting the story of the monarch b.u.t.terfly to be more dramatic than it really was.

Wenner's own explanation of the southward movement of eastern monarchs each fall went like this: ”In the fall, monarch adults in Canada and the upper Midwest likely receive some environmental trigger (change in photoperiod or seasonal cold snap) and cease egg laying. When the main jet stream moves south out of Canada, high and low pressure cells become carried across extreme southern Canada and later across the U.S. At that time, monarchs need merely rise on thermals during clearing conditions and become carried toward the south out of the region in which they were reared. If they have reached sufficient alt.i.tude in their ride on thermals, the north winds can carry some of them considerable distances toward Mexico.” The reason they all seemed to end up in the same place in Mexico, Wenner argued, was simple: Monarchs were found in the overwintering sites because that was where people expected to find them. In other words, they might be in other places as well, but the world was big, and who was looking?

D-PLEX, where this discussion and the one about the sun compa.s.s and those about the effect of logging on the Mexican habitat and anything else concerning monarchs took place, was another of Chip Taylor's inventions. There were eighteen messages posted in December 1995, the first month the site was in business. Less than four years later, in September 1999, there were eight hundred. There seemed to be no end to the controversies, the information, and the queries. Chip Taylor stayed in the background as much as possible, letting other personalities dominate, but then he would appear, fielding questions, noting unusual recoveries of tagged b.u.t.terflies (in Cuba, Ireland, the Bahamas), and refereeing the fights that swept through the group now and then like the flu. (”Here's a cla.s.sic example of a double standard in the b.u.t.terfly community,” a professional b.u.t.terfly breeder named Rick Mikula wrote in October 1997: ”b.u.t.terflies transported from Michigan to Texas, which everyone will think is cute because children were involved. However, were these b.u.t.terflies infected with anything? Who knows? But when a professional b.u.t.terfly breeder rears b.u.t.terflies under laboratory conditions, eliminating any sick stock, [he's a] bad [person]. Under the current double standard no one turns their head when a nine-year-old releases what could be the most infected monarch at the roosting site, but [everyone] screams when someone takes their time and does it right.” Soon afterward Lincoln Brower weighed in, directing his reply to Chip Taylor but posting it for all to see: ”Rick Mikula's e-mail message on the interchanges of monarchs borders on a lack of civility and does not advance intelligent discourse on what is a legitimate debate about the wisdom (or lack thereof) in making artificial transfers of monarch b.u.t.terflies between different geographic areas in North America.” ”I truly hope you did not find my response as uncivil as Dr. Brower did,” Mikula wrote back. ”I did not mean it to be.... The question I posed still puzzles me. I am all for kids' releasing b.u.t.terflies, but it seems the professionals always get a bad rap. But I must say after that blasting from Dr. Brower it will certainly be the last time I respond to a posting on the list.” It wasn't.) The migration-if that was what it was-was tracked in a haphazard but engaging way, with people all over the country reporting when they had seen their first spring monarch, or when the fall monarchs were pa.s.sing through, and in what numbers. There was an exclamatory feeling, pa.s.sed like a torch from writer to writer as the monarchs moved north, or west, or south: First Texas Sighting! First Monarch to Reach Canada! Monarchs Cl.u.s.tering in Pacific Grove! Monarchs Leave El Rosario! And n.o.body seemed to tire of it, not even Adrian Wenner, tending his garden in Santa Barbara. ”I continue to maintain that we actually know little about the remarkable migration phenomenon,” he wrote in September 1997, in a message that challenged, yet again, the sun-compa.s.s theory. ”In the meantime, all stages of monarch caterpillars continue to ravage the milkweed plants in our yard and the females continue to oviposit.”

Aberrations were noted, too, as when someone observed a monarch b.u.t.terfly mating with a queen b.u.t.terfly. Or when, in mid-November 1997, Don Davis wrote that he had ”received a report from a relative today that in the northwest end of metropolitan Toronto ... he observed a monarch, with wings opened, sunning on the south side of his garage. I might be a bit skeptical of this report, except that I know this gentleman well and I know that he knows what a monarch looks like.”

”Thanks to all the taggers,” Chip Taylor addressed the group two days later. ”Your efforts have once again produced some interesting data. And thanks to all those who have been so gracious as to track us down or send us the information on the tagged b.u.t.terflies they encountered.... Some interesting patterns have emerged. One of these patterns has to do with the relations.h.i.+p between direction and distance. Nearly all long distance flights are south or southwest, but shorter flights show greater variation in direction.”

LATE FALL AND early winter were always a quiet time on D-Plex. It was as if the partic.i.p.ants, like the b.u.t.terflies, were in a state of creative diapause, conserving their thoughts and attention for the remigration a few months off. The excitement of being part of the long-distance relay race as the monarchs swept south from Canada to Mexico was, for the time being, over. In October 1997 there were some three hundred messages on D-Plex. The next month there were only about a hundred. It was the same in December. Don Davis offered his ”Odds and Ends” a few times, and there was the usual chatter: discussions about monarchs in Florida and tips on buying milkweed at Home Depot and a message from someone in Warsaw alerting everyone to a movie on monarchs that would be airing on Polish TV.

From Mexico, however, almost nothing was heard, and almost no one was writing about what was going on there, either. It was as if the b.u.t.terflies, having reached their winter home, were now safely in their beds, asleep, and not to be disturbed. But that, of course, was not at all what was happening. Although their metabolisms had slowed, and though their reproductive systems were temporarily shut off, the monarchs were not hibernating. They spent a surprising amount of time in the air, playing what looked like a child's game: sunbathing in the trees until a cloud drew a curtain on that warmth, then rus.h.i.+ng madly skyward, flapping. The sound of their wings was startling then, like spontaneous clapping. It erupted, and arced, and fell away. Most of the time, though, the monarchs were huddled on tree trunks and branches, one upon the next until the bark was no longer visible. They were waiting: waiting for the days to lengthen, for the temperature to rise, for their biological clocks to start ticking loudly again.

NEAR THE END of December a cold front moved through Mexico, and there was some concern voiced on D-Plex that the b.u.t.terflies might have been affected. Since so many monarchs were cl.u.s.tered in such a small place, cold weather posed a danger, not only to individual monarchs but to the population at large. Chip Taylor posted a calming message three days before Christmas. Yes, it had been cold, he said, but not to worry: the monarchs were fine. ”Mortality can be severe however when snowfall is followed by cold rain and then freezing conditions,” he wrote. ”Long periods (a week or more) of cold, rainy weather appear to have the strongest impacts on the monarchs. The monarchs can't move under these conditions and many become 'waterlogged' (wetted) and fall to the ground where they usually die (or are eaten by mice). I don't have all the literature available but the most severe mortality attributable to a particular weather event I was able to find occurred in 1981 (and not '83, the time of the last major El Nio). Even though the mortality was extreme, 80 percent of the b.u.t.terflies survived this event. Perhaps Bill Calvert could provide more information on this and other causes of extreme mortality at the roost areas.”

Two weeks later he did. Calvert was back in Mexico, at the Chincua and El Rosario sanctuaries, and the news was less rea.s.suring. ”It rained hard on Sat.u.r.day, January 18th,” he reported. ”Tuesday was partly cloudy and cold. Wednesday not a cloud was in the sky and the b.u.t.terflies did perform! The Rosario colony was quite high, still above the Llano de los Canejos. That's about equivalent to the top of the loop, the same level as the very top of the trail system, but over to the left about 200 yards. It's a kilometer-and-a-half walk to the colony. At this colony we found evidence of many b.u.t.terflies knocked down from their cl.u.s.ters by the weekend storm. To get to the colony at Chincua you walk about three-quarters of a kilometer down from the Mojonera Alta where we found evidence of moderate to heavy mortality due to the mid-December storm. The colony that was in position near the Mojonera Alta had moved. Only a few weakened b.u.t.terflies were evident among piles of dead ones.”

Soon after Bill Calvert wrote this, Chip Taylor and Sandra Perez made the trip to El Rosario themselves. ”One observer told me he had seen piles of dead monarchs up to two feet deep near the top of the ridge at Chincua,” Taylor wrote, noting that the local guides there were reporting that the numbers of monarchs appeared to be down from the year before. Taylor, however, was unconvinced. Population size was always difficult to a.s.sess, he said, especially when b.u.t.terflies were spread across a large area, as they were that winter. He was sanguine. The monarchs looked good, winter was nearly over, five tagged b.u.t.terflies had been found already, and he had seen a mating pair overhead, a sure sign of spring and of the remigration to come.

A few days later it seemed that this ”all clear” might have been premature. David Marriott, who ran the Monarch Project, a California-based monarch education program, was also in Angangueo, helping a film crew make an IMAX doc.u.mentary on the b.u.t.terflies, and he called Chip Taylor in Lawrence; Taylor relayed his observations to D-Plex: ”The overnight lows at the top of the mountain appear to be lower than normal due to the lack of overcast on most nights. Patches of ice and frost are common each morning. Some of the monarchs visiting seeps to get moisture late in the day are evidently becoming too cold to return to the trees and many appear to be dying from exposure overnight.... Local residents claim that this is the driest year in memory.”

I was away when these messages were posted, and so I read them later as a group, archivally, without the distractions of watching them unfold in real time, though my mind wandered to Contepec and the horses, and how they had been unable to get any purchase because the ground was so dry. It seemed only natural to find a note from Betty Aridjis, Homero Aridjis's wife, in this stack of mail. A fire had broken out in the mountains we had climbed, destroying hundreds of acres of forest. ”The two areas which burned were on the Contepec, Michoacn, side,” Betty said, ”precisely the place where monarchs had arrived in November, although they [had] quickly abandoned the mountain as there was a dearth of water in the area due to a severe summer drought, and on the Temascalcingo, Mexico, side, an area behind the Llano de la Mula.” It was believed that the blaze had been started by a campfire gone out of control. ”Lincoln,” Betty Aridjis wrote to Lincoln Brower, though she had addressed her note to no one in particular, ”remember that on our visit to the Llano de la Mula we saw the remains of several apparently recent campfires?” I remembered, too.

IT WAS MONTHS before anyone tried to put the pieces together-to make sense of the anecdotal reports, to fit them together. Even Chip Taylor in Lawrence, the man with all the pieces, was having trouble. ”What happened to all those fall monarchs that were seen heading toward Mexico?” he asked in the 1997 season summary. ”Did they make it? It's hard to tell.... Perhaps many of the monarchs didn't make it to Mexico or died shortly after their arrival. I visited El Rosario on 14 November.... The number of monarchs in the air and in the trees was spectacular but as a biologist I couldn't take my eyes off the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of dead and dying monarchs already scattered on the forest floor. How strange, I thought, to have the biological drive to fly all the way to Mexico only to die within days of arrival.

”In February, we saw evidence at El Rosario that monarchs caught in the open or on the ground at the end of the day had probably frozen to death. Cold mornings limited the ability of monarchs to fly to sources of water, and water became increasingly difficult to find as the winter progressed. At El Rosario, the lack of water contributed to an unusual redistribution of the monarchs late in the winter. In late February and March, a large portion of the colony moved downhill to a source of moisture and trees on the property of Angangueo, the adjacent ejido.... This appears to be the first time in memory that the colony resettled on the Angangueo side.

”The condition of the monarchs at the end of winter probably determines their ability to remigrate in the spring. Was this a more stressful winter than normal? We don't know.

”Unlike the spring of 1997, there have been no reports of large numbers of spring monarchs on the move.... What does this mean? Are we in for a normal year, a good year, or a bad year? At this point, we don't know.”

OBSERVATION DOES NOT always yield a bad guy, even if the narrative demands it. No one knew if drought had caused the b.u.t.terflies to move downhill. No one knew why they appeared to be in bad shape, or why the fall migration, considered to be the ”best” in twenty years, had not led to overwhelming numbers in the preserves. No one knew what had happened to all those b.u.t.terflies.

Chapter 6.

TORPID, that's the way a monarch in winter is often described, and there were times, sitting by the wood stove in my house in the mountains that January, watching the snow fall and the birds peck at the feeder, when I felt like that myself, as if a full day's work would be to stay warm and dry. The snow would come, and then it would disappear, beaten back by an icy rain that kept tugging on the power lines, often taking them down. My family left for a while, and I was on my own, being careful always to have wood in the woodbox and candles and matches and jugs of water ready for the inevitable hours when the lights would flicker and there would be darkness and chill and a quiet that would amplify the dog's breathing till it sounded like the saw of an ocean tide. There was a game my daughter and her schoolmates played called Predator and Prey, where the prey was a migrating monarch trying to avoid the long reach of its many predators. It was important, then, to ”think like a monarch” in order to survive, and sometimes, stoking the fire and reading by flashlight on the couch at dusk, I would find myself thinking like I thought a monarch might ”think,” thinking the most elemental thoughts about water and heat, nothing more.

I called Lincoln Brower to get an update on the situation in Mexico, and he mentioned that there had been death threats made against Homero Aridjis, who now had three bodyguards and was thinking of leaving Mexico for a while. I took out a quarto of Homero's poems and read them one evening in the uneven glow of the fire. ”I have no fear of death / I have died many times already,” began a poem called ”Fray Gaspar De Caravajal Remembers the Amazon.” ”Day after day / like all men I have sailed / toward nowhere / in search of El Dorado / but like them all / I have found only / the extreme glare of extreme pa.s.sion.”

In those quiet, unmolested hours, I was wondering about pa.s.sion, too-about why it arose and why it went away, and how it was that a small insect, for instance, was able to give people their voice. Was lepidoptery a way of cleaving to the authenticity of childhood, to a world undistracted by pretensions, the way certain pa.s.sions of the flesh were not so much about loving someone else as about finding and expressing one's true and essential self? ”Pa.s.sion extinguishes the logic in chronologic,” I wrote in my notebook on January 12, a day when rain fell unseasonably and there was thunder and lightning and a wicked yellow sky. What I meant was that pa.s.sion kept one fully in the present, so that time became a series of mutually exclusive ”nows.” Pa.s.sion obviated history.

But what about migration? Nothing demands such complete attention to the present moment as survival, which, after all, is what the concerted movement from one geographic area to another is about. Yet success-getting there-rests on instinct, the repository of history. In the Old Testament G.o.d tells Moses to lead the Hebrew people out of Egypt and take them to Canaan, the land of milk and honey. It was the first recorded migration, that forty-year trip to bountiful, and as with the monarch migration, none who started the journey completed it. So how had they known where to go? Had they used a sun compa.s.s, relied on topographical cues, followed the stars? Had they been lured by the poles? The Bible says, but not exactly. Through Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Joshua, as the Hebrew people move across the desert, they are led and dragged and prompted by the hand of G.o.d.

The enigmatic, improbable, long-distance, multigenerational movement of monarch b.u.t.terflies has some resonance here. Since it makes so little sense that bugs, living serial lives, could find Canaan each year, and since science has not yet offered a sufficient explanation for how that happens, why not call it numinous and leave it at that? It wouldn't be wrong-surely it wouldn't be wrong-but the fact is, it would be small. It would fail to account for intention, if there is any, and for genetic memory, if that is there, and for the force as fundamental as blood or s.e.x. The wind comes up, the rain comes down, the clouds cover the radial light. The asters have withered, the goldenrod, too, but the monarch, moving south-southwest, twenty-five, forty, eighty-nine miles a day, sure in its mission to survive and reproduce, adjusts. Adaptation, the engine of evolution, is always on full throttle. The constant, variable, unseen, unpredictable accommodations made by a migrating monarch to get to where it needs to go, and its ability to make them, are as essential to its evolutionary design as the shape of its wings or its unpalatability to most birds.

THIS, IT TURNED OUT when I caught up with him in California, was Paul Cherubini's point exactly: the monarch was a remarkably plastic creature, an opportunist able to deal with, and even exploit, what came its way; opportunism was the ultimate evolutionary adaptation. Cherubini, who sold agricultural pesticides for a living, was a provocateur in the monarch world, the one person who could be counted on to take the incendiary position-take it and let it roll among the other monarch enthusiasts as if it were a firecracker about to explode. Then, like a bad boy standing on the fringes, he looked with delight on their horror and revulsion. Lincoln Brower, who could often be found on-line sparring with him, liked to call Cherubini ”the exterminator.”

If Brower spoke for the b.u.t.terflies from a preservationist's point of view, Cherubini spoke for them from a developer's perspective, though he wasn't one. Rather, he was that rare species of naturalist who despised environmentalists. To him they were corrupt, money-grubbing elitists. He reminded me of some seasonal workers I knew who lived off unemployment for half the year but always voted for whichever candidate vowed to weed out welfare cheats. He was an angry white guy, the kind who always felt left out and disrespected, the kind whose anger-if anyone cared to notice-came from sadness, not from spite.

”I grew up right around San Leandro,” Cherubini told me the day he and I went on a road trip together from Sacramento to the Bay Area, looking at the unlikely places monarchs had chosen to breed and roost. ”I used to catch monarchs in wild fields, and I saw all these industrial parks coming in and crowding out everything, and there was one particular monarch site that only had five hundred monarchs and it got cut down and I said, 'My G.o.d, what's going to happen?' And I read books like Paul Ehrlich's Population Bomb that said there was going to be world famine by the mid-1970s and I said 'My G.o.d, I don't have a future.' And I got depressed, seriously depressed. And my parents were having marital problems and the psychiatrist wanted to interview me to get a sense about what their problems were but then he realized I had problems, too, and he said, 'You're depressed, why do you think you have no future?' and I said, 'Because these scientists have Ph.D.'s,' and he said, 'That's not right, you're paranoid,' and I said, 'I'm not going to come to you anymore, facts are facts, scientists are scientists.'

”Then when I went to U.C. Davis I had a professor who was able to show me the structure of science and ideology, and also show the business side of science. He was able to show me that a large part of the environmental movement was based on business. I mean, Paul Ehrlich was worth many hundreds of thousands of dollars and had his own private airplane, all derived from those environmental books in addition to collecting his salary from Stanford. And suddenly I realized that especially in [places like] Ivy League colleges it's a big-buck industry to say all this stuff. If you have a Ph.D. you can say the world's oceans are dying and you don't have to be accountable. You can get rich and not be accountable.”

We were driving down a superhighway then, eight lanes across, jostled by the truck traffic as Cherubini kept his eyes low to the ground, looking for monarchs and milkweed in the median strips. They were there, though not in the concentrations he had hoped to show me, for the ground was dry and brown and the milkweed had died back. Still, monarchs would stray into his line of vision and he'd point them out as if they proved his point: habitat protection not only was unnecessary, it was a sham. ”Some books, articles, and Web sites (including the Monarch Watch Web site) often state that California monarch overwintering sites are 'threatened' or 'steadily disappearing' due to real estate development and hence the western monarch migration is an 'endangered phenomenon,' ” Cherubini wrote on D-Plex around the time of my visit with him. ”I think the evidence ... from the most heavily urbanized areas of North America refutes that dogmatic interpretation of the situation.”

”I don't think there's a limit to development,” he said when I asked. It was the obvious question. I didn't think it was the obvious answer.

”Look at Los Angeles,” he went on. ”Look at an aerial photograph of Santa Monica and the area down to the airport. Every inch of land is taken up except for the golf courses. There's no such thing as a vacant lot. Monarchs just have a ball there. They go into people's yards in the daytime and drink the nectar. And especially when there's a drought, they just love the water sprinklers.”

It was a happy thought, all those b.u.t.terflies flitting through all those oscillating sprinklers like little kids frolicking on a hot summer day. I could see how, if you believed in monarchs' ”having a ball,” it could be quite compelling. And that was not all, Paul was saying.

”In Santa Barbara there is a huge Chevron oil and gas refinery and they have a monarch colony right on the property. It's the largest aggregation in California. You can photograph monarchs right on their billowing smokestacks. When I saw that, I realized the whole idea of fumes' being bad for monarchs was not right. People live to be eighty in downtown Los Angeles.”

I wasn't sure how to respond to this. People die from asthma in downtown Los Angeles, too. People have more respiratory problems in Mexico City than in Sioux City. Each of these facts said something-but what?

We were headed for a couple of golf courses near the Bay Area, places that Paul Cherubini thought ”broke all the rules” about overwintering habitat. To the north of them there were town houses, to the south the Hayward Airport, to the west the bay. The greens were triangulated in between, open and flat, shaded here and there by eucalyptus trees, especially along the fairways. There was no canopy, no understory, and some seaborne wind. It wasn't like El Rosario, that was for sure. It wasn't even like Natural Bridges State Park, down the coast in Santa Cruz, which, though on the beach, was densely wooded.

”To my mind, if you had all this openness at ten thousand five hundred feet in El Rosario, you'd be flooded with monarchs,” Paul said as we dodged the golf b.a.l.l.s that were zipping left and right.

”But you'd never have this much open s.p.a.ce, right?” I asked, gliding like a monarch toward a stand of eucalyptus where I hoped to find sanctuary from predatory Spauldings and Wilsons.

”Well, they've never had the opportunity to develop anything like this,” he said, hustling alongside me.

”But would you want to do that?” I asked. ”Why would you want to do that?”