Mariposas

Cerro Pellon Butterfly Reserve, Estado de Mexico

After I lost my credit card and played harmonica for my bread in Patzcuaro, I headed into the highlands where the monarch butterflies congregate every winter.  I talked the keepers of the park into letting me hike up and camp on the summit on Cerro Pellon, a few thousand feet above the altiplano.  To the west were the fanged peaks and deep valleys of Michoacan and somewhere to the east, just beyond the horizon,  the vast sprawl and chaos of Mexico City.  But there on the mountaintop, the silence was complete.  An hour´s walk down from the summit were the butterflies:

They come many long miles from the north in solitary flight and alight on the branches, first a few, then hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands so that the stiff pine branches hang to the ground under their weight as if some seething, crawling volcanic ash had descended from the skies.   Their wings fill the air with hum and hush. 

Come the night chill and they fold together on the branches like the most intricate origami, and the rustle of their patterned wings is stilled.  Creatures walk the forest floor in the darkness and and the butterfly covered branches above arch like a cavern roof full of stone invertebrates a million years dead. 



When the first sun ray comes singing down to the tree tops they stir, and one by one spring open like a tiger lily, were all the slow hours of its blossoming seen in one resplendent moment. They can't fly in the cold and fall to the ground, knocking off a hundred others on their way and pour down the branches like warming snow sliding off a tin roof.

They land on whatever is below, be it boulder, bush or beast.  They beat their wings and the ground is a flurry of black and orange and the sound is powerful as a very distant waterfall and intricate as a mother hushing her baby in a lonely cabin.  They move and struggle until...

...they take flight and wheel in circles miles across in the broad sky, spiraling upward and passing in their sometimes pensive, sometimes swooping flight, by the high peak where I am camped.

Endnote: Scientists have discovered that monarch butterflies are attracted to testosterone.  They have also discovered that a particularly potent form of testosterone exists in males around the age of 22 that come from certain mountain vales in the western provinces of Colorado.  These two discoveries, taken together, lend ample explanation to the behaviors displayed by the butterflies in these photos.