Four Wings and a Prayer Read Free

background, without most of us paying it any attention. But paying attention is part of our animal heritage, a link to deer and dolphin, owl and bear. And that, perhaps, is where the itch of curiosity begins, and the ongoing attempt to scratch it.
    People have been paying attention to the monarch for hundreds of years, and most of them, unlike Bill Calvert, havenot been professional scientists. They have been drawn to these insects because their behavior has seemed so unlikely, so amazing, so nearly heroic. The monarchs’ presumed heroism, in fact, has been the subtext for much of the fascination. In the process, data have been collected and then organized into a narrative. Ultimately, that narrative didn’t have to be true, but like all stories, it had to
seem
to be true.
    Bill Calvert was one of the storytellers, as well as part of the story itself. As an undergraduate at the University of Texas he studied philosophy, and as a graduate student there, zoology. His dissertation was on butterfly feet, how female butterflies find their host plants. He started looking at monarchs on a lark because he was stuck in Massachusetts one winter and wanted an excuse to go south. He went to a talk given by Lincoln Brower, then a professor at Amherst College and the world’s leading monarch scientist. Brower needed butterflies for his research, and he put Calvert up to flying down to Texas to collect some. It was the beginning of a loose collaboration that continues to this day.
    In monarch circles, which are bigger than one might suppose, Bill Calvert is something of a legend. It’s not just his reputation as a cowboy entomologist, a guy who sleeps in his truck in pursuit of monarch butterflies and has more field notes and more data than he’ll ever be able to write up—though these are part of it. What makes him a legend is that almost twenty-five years ago Bill Calvert figured out, based on a couple of clues in a
National Geographic
article whose authors were trying to keep it secret, where monarchs from the eastern United States and Canada spend the winter.
    “I had a friend who was a librarian,” Calvert said, “and she gave me a bunch of maps. There were two clues in the
National Geographic
article, that the butterfly colonies were atten thousand feet and that they were in the state of Michoacán. When you put those two features on a map, there were not very many choices.”
    Calvert and three friends borrowed a truck and drove to Angangueo, a mountain town that was home to a silver-mining company once owned by the Guggenheim family. He was carrying a picture of a monarch butterfly, and when he showed it to the mayor of the town, the mayor became very excited and began to talk about a butterfly roost high in the mountains, a place called Chincua. It was the last day of 1976. Bill Calvert called Lincoln Brower and told him this. The next day Calvert and his companions found the butterflies on a ridge above Zapatero Canyon.
    Bill Calvert gave up his postdoc on tent caterpillars. He bought lots of maps and started looking for place-names with the word
paloma
—“butterfly”—in them. He mounted expedition after expedition, discovering seven more colonies, roaming around Mexico on National Science Foundation money. Nearly twenty-five years later he was still roaming. He had a wife and a son back near Austin, but the marriage was breaking up. He was too restless—or she wasn’t restless enough. “You pretty much have to be retired to do this research, wandering around, looking at things,” Bill Calvert said. “You can spend all your time traveling around and not getting conclusive answers. So that leaves people like me to do it.”
    I T WAS NOVEMBER 6. According to the biological clock that unwittingly winds us all, the butterflies would be approaching their winter home. The door would be ajar, andthey would be streaming over the threshold, marathoners tired from their long journey, eager for a patch of bark, or the