The Sound of a Million Butterfly Wings

Left image 2004, right image 2008.
Image courtesy NASA Earth Observatory, by Robert Simmon and Daniel Slayback.

That's a sound I hope to hear some day, when I check another one of those bucket list items off and visit the monarchs overwintering in Mexico. Fellow members of the Monarch Teacher Network, a group that started right here in NJ, struggle to describe the experience upon returning from annual pilgrimages to see the phenomenon. Just twelve mountaintops in Mexico provide the butterflies with protection to wait out the North American winter.

Despite the assurances from Mexico's government that the monarch habitat would be protected, illegal logging continues to shrink the oyamel forests. Newly released NASA images reveal a devastating clearcut, logging that occurred in just the last four years. Lincoln Brower, perhaps the world's most renowned monarch expert, estimates 1,100 acres of habitat for the Lomas de Aparicio monarch colony were lost to illegal logging since 2004.

I better get to Mexico soon.

Learn more about monarchs:

• Monarch Butterfly (Danaus plexippus)
• Monarch Migration
• Get Ready for the Spring Monarch Migration