Masters of migration: thanks to the efforts of scientists and nature enthusiasts world-wide, the majestic monarch butterfly sanctuaries in Mexico are being protected for future generations.

• Author: Herrera, Adriana

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

From time immemorial, monarch butterflies have been migrating thousands of miles from the Great Lakes region of North America to spend their winters in the dense oyamel forests of the Mexican states of Michoacan and Mexico. Known for their intense orange wings, black veins, and white spots, the monarchs form veritable rivers of blazing color as they fly their diagonal route over North America and the Gulf of Mexico each year, guided by the sun. Scientists studied them closely for years, unable to find the final destination of their migration. Meanwhile, Mexican peasants were welcoming the butterflies winter after winter on their communal lands without realizing they held the final piece of the puzzle. In 1975, careful sleuthing and combined efforts finally led to the answer to the great mystery of the monarch migratory route.

Since then, scientists, peasant farmers, and even poets have been engaged in an epic struggle to protect the monarchs and their incomparable journey. In the year 2000, a Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve was designated in Michoacan, and in 2008 the area was declared a World Heritage Site, increasing hopes--and shared responsibility--for the preservation of these fragile and tenacious insects. To understand the importance of this endeavor, three great stories must be told: the story of monarch migration, how the migration routes were found, and how this miracle of nature is being protected.

In the 1920s, when Frederick Urquhart was a child, he looked at the autumn sky colored orange by groups of monarchs headed south from Canada and was fascinated by the question of where their journey led. At the time, no one knew the answer to that question. By the late 1930s, Urquhart and his wife Norah Patterson had come up with the idea of marking the butterflies' wings with tiny adhesive stickers to learn about their migratory routes.

Later, in another part of the continent, Mexican scientists Carlos Galindo Leal and Eduardo Rendon Salinas began to research the same question, using their house as a laboratory before receiving funding from the University of Ontario. Two decades after the Urquharts began marking butterflies, Galindo and Rendon organized thousands of volunteers to participate in marking monarchs for a migration study in Mexico. That was when they discovered that monarchs did not fly at night and that they flew over the Gulf of Mexico. In 1960, through the Mexican Forests Program of the World Wildlife Foundation, Galindo and Rendon published a monograph on monarchs. They continued to follow the route for many years without finding the exact place where the butterflies were hibernating.

Meanwhile, in the town of Gontepec, Michoacan, another boy--Homero Aridjis, the youngest of five brothers born to a Greek father and a Mexican mother--used to climb Cerro Altamirano near his home to look at the monarch butterflies that flooded the forests for almost four months in the winter before they left again, heading north. No one hi iris area knew where the butterflies came from or where they went. "When I began to write poems," Aridjis said, "I used to climb the hill that dominated the memory of my childhood. Its slopes, gullies, and streams were full of animal voices--owls, hummingbirds, mocking birds, coyotes, deer, armadillo. The natural world stimulated my poetry." But of all of these animals, he says the monarch butterflies were his "first love." Aridjis won Mexico's very prestigious Xavier Villarrutia Award at age 24 and years later, monarchs were still making their appearance in his writing. His 1971 book, El poeta nino, includes a beautiful poem that goes like this:

"You travel/by day/ like a winged tiger/ burning yourself/ in your flight/ Tell me/ what supernatural/ life is/painted on your wings...."

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Back to the story of the scientists. In 1973, when the Urquharts were still trying to...