Bitter Winter and the Monarch Butterfly

Through all this, I keep on thinking about a very special morning last September when, sitting in the warm sunshine on a chaise lounge poolside at our house, I saw something in the flower garden that brought me up short.

A monarch butterfly was trying to figure out how to fly. It wasn’t injured or anything. I was close enough to see that this was the case. It was learning. It’d flutter up a few feet, then settle back onto the brickwork. Then it’d do it again and fall into a bush. Then it’d try it again, get a little further, but then fall over another way. Monarchs, when full grown, are huge, the very biggest butterflies in the butterfly universe. But this one still had some growing to do. It was, perhaps, an adolescent.

Its reckless acrobatics made me think of the Wright brothers working to get their flying contraption up and into the air for the first time. It also reminded me of when one of my kids tried to figure out how to ride a bike.

Twenty minutes into its efforts, however, this particular young monarch got its bearings and flew off. Although it was gone for the day, it did, along with several others, return to enjoy our place. They called it home until October when, finally, they headed off for good. Through to last week, I had not seen any more of them since.

As a result of this, I have made a study of monarch butterflies and have learned that what this adolescent butterfly was doing on that September day was part of a ritual so complicated and amazing that I have to pass it along to you. Surely, the hand of God is involved in this.

Monarch butterflies, once they get their bearings, will grow bigger and stronger as they leave these parts and begin to migrate south for the winter to join up with other monarchs in a mountain range and forest about 70 miles east of Mexico City called Sierra Madre. There, they will become part of a flock of a half billion monarchs who have fluttered in great yellow and black swarms 3,000 miles from Long Island, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois and elsewhere to blanket all the trees of that forest and enjoy the warmth of Mexico’s winter weather, until it comes time, in mid-March, to flutter back to spend the summer here again. Another 3,000 miles.

How do we know all this? We know because researchers are now putting transmitter tags on monarchs in the same way they have for a long time been tagging sharks. With the tags, they know where the monarchs go. Of course the tags are almost microscopic in size, so the butterflies are not aware of them. Wispy thin, they attach to wings. Thus attached, they accompany the monarch from Mexico, up the Missisippi, east through Ohio and then to here in our garden, a few of them, to where they started.

We also know that the monarchs gain even more strength as they go. Mostly, they eat milkwood, a healthy plant filled with vitamins found in abundance on those mountains in Mexico and along the route on their way home. They eat other grasses too. But a year ago, we had, for the first time, planted milkwood in our garden, on the recommendation of Michael Mackey at the Wild Bird Crossing store in Bridgehampton last spring. The arriving monarchs had found our planted milkweed. And that’s why I saw what I did last September.

There was another reason that monarchs like milkweed. Although they will eat other plants, they will breed and raise their young only in places where there is milkweed. Somehow, the nectar in milkweed agitates the sexual organs of these monarchs. Leaving Mexico, you wouldn’t think they had sex organs. They were not visible to the naked eye. But in making the return trip, the sex organs grow larger. The male organs look like sticks. The female organs look like tubes. And they are now driving the monarchs with new sensations.

Above our house in East Hampton last summer, some of the returning monarchs looked down upon our milkweed, and feeling they were ready, decided this would be the place. This involved a kind of courtship, with the male and female agreeing to participate as a sort of butterfly version of man and wife. The ritual would include coupling. Some pairs remain attached to one another for as many as 16 hours. With the eggs now sticky and fertilized, the females stick them to the underside of milkweed leaves or tree branches. And the males shoo away and even attack other monarchs that try to intervene. They will defend their families for the rest of their lives.

And they or their progeny will come back year after year to the place they chose, such as our backyard, to do it again.

It seems unbelievable, Mexico to East Hampton. But I did the math. It’s a 3,000-mile flight. If a butterfly can go five miles an hour, such a migration should take about six weeks.

The fact is that last July, just a month before I saw the monarch trying to fly, my wife had headed down the steps to the pool to discover several yellow and black cocoons, each about an inch long, one attached stickily to the underside of the wooden railing that led down the stairs to the pool and the other on the underside of a milkweed plant.

As something was happening here, we photographed them and observed them day after day. At one point a black and yellow caterpillar had wriggled its way out of the cocoon, discarding where it came from like an old jacket. Then came September.

And this one butterfly — we cheered it on — was trying to fly. And that is what came to mind when the blizzard came last week.

I hope we see the monarchs again as summer warms.