ROYALTY ON THE WING

Of all the sky's astonishments, few can match the monarch butterfly for dainty durability beyond even the scope of an ordinary lifetime. I'd always heard of seasonal migrations extending between central Mexico and eastern Canada, thousands of miles farther than one butterfly could ever go. So two generations each way to complete the loop? A brief googling exposes this as only vaguely factual. The more I read the less certain I am of anything – always a sign that the trail will be a long one.So far the biggest surprise for me is the idea of five generations to complete one migration cycle. How's that work? And over how many years? Given a fresh departure from Mexico every year, do different generations pass each other heading opposite directions? Presently, theories outnumber explanations, with little agreement except that other migration behaviors also exist, including some monarchs that go nowhere at all. The real mystery is how they do it. Nobody knows.There's evidence both for and against some brew of genetic memory and/or an internal map preprogrammed to recognize geographic features. You can bet there's more to it than that. Birds have been proven to use a whole suite of nav systems, including celestial and magnetic, so why not butterflies? There are diatoms (single-celled algea) living deep in sand who rise to the surface only for full moons... Gotta wonder. Here's where I pitch my usual non-scientific observation, answering no questions but raising one more. Of the sixteen seasons I soared in Vermont, only one was marked by an intensive visitation of monarch butterflies. For weeks that summer you couldn't fly midday without your leading edges turning a lovely shade of orange. Canopies too. Awfully sad at first, but you had to get used it. I remember cheating on proximity to cloudbase – shhh – and watching clusters of monarchs loft into it like thousands of tiny Lord Jesuses ascending en masse to Glory. (Entirely unrelated but exactly the same, you haven't really seen autumn in New England until you've risen with it in florescent tutti-fruiti swirls of 'fallen' leaves high into the sky. Sorry, off topic but I couldn't resist.) Back to the monarchs and their inexplicable peregrinations, my question is why we got to enjoy them only one year in sixteen.  Where'd they go those other fifteen trips?