Their migration is “the personification of happiness” —Smithsonian Magazine
I. Autumn Once there were so many, their weight could break branches. Trees filled with butterflies in the high altitude of this sacred Oyamel fir forest. In the chill of morning, in topor, they gather in clusters, wings closed as if dead leaves, until the sun warms their gentle wings, and they begin to move. Their circannual clock of this super generation living eight times longer than a normal monarch fly from Canada to Mexico and produce a normal generation to succeed them. II. Winter Time of rest, sedentary, until sunlight releases frozen wings or to lie dormant inside a hidden egg beneath a milkweed leaf waiting for a kiss of warmth. III. Spring In March, I follow a male Monarch into groves of cedar. He has found another, and they tightly circle until the female Rests on a branch. He pins her, holding her wings together With his legs and seems to caress and taste her with his antennae, sensing her pheromones His hard beat of wings and rhythm, determined, even damaging, of his own wings. Hundreds of tiny eggs lain by this single female in her journey, A miracle passing down over millions of years that hatch eating voraciously, Until they hang themselves by their own skin, turning green with studs of gold. IV. Summer Sleeping under the moon high in the trees, they awake to the comfort of seemingly, endless warmth, and travel north, past the Rockies and into Canada until the first chill that signals them to lay the generation that will migrate all the way home. A cloud of orange, if we are lucky, past mountains, forests, pastures, gathering nectars, pollinating the fruits like fairies with magic dust. Until they make it to the high mountains of Mexico to begin again.
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Amarillo Bay 