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Of Mice and Monarchs
- Oregon State University Press
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15 Of Mice and Monarchs So often we go looking for something and find something else: people in the street, books on a shelf, words in a dictionary. It happens in nature all the time, if we are open to what’s out there. In fact, when people ask me how one becomes a naturalist, I say that being open to what’s out there is at least as important as knowing what is out there, because the world can’t help being an allusive,referential,sidetracked kind of a place.So it was with the mouse and the monarch. I spent the fall of 1996 following the western migration of monarch butterflies. I wanted to see how these astonishing insects live during their great winter homecoming, where they go, and what it would be like to be guided by another organism, for months, and for many, many miles. Throughout my long journey—Canada to Mexico and back through California—I tagged every monarch I could, applying to the forewing a little adhesive label imprinted with a serial number and an address or phone number for reporting finds.Tagging yields much of what we know about monarch movements,though fewer than one tag in a thousand is recovered. None of my monarchs was found, so I continued tagging the autumn emigrants the next year. One September evening I rolled across the Bickleton Hills from the Yakama Indian Nation down to the Columbia Gorge and chose a campsite on a bluff above the Great River of the West. The infamous gorge winds forced me to sleep in my little car—a frequent accommodation on quick field trips to awkward places. But a paddlewheel tour boat, lit up like a dream from Samuel Clemens’s youth, lulled me to sleep. For a while, anyway.When a sound I took for rain on the roof began to resemble a race track heard from a distance, I realized I was sharing my quarters.Anyone who has ever camped out of doors, in a rustic cabin, or in an old Honda has likely become personally acquainted with Peromyscus maniculatus: the most successful mammal on the continent. Plenty of deer mice live in our old Swedish homestead, and I wouldn’t have sweated this TheTangled Bank:Writings from Orion 16 one, but I had a heavy field day ahead and every time I passed into the precincts of sleep it did its little wakey-wakey walk over my hands, thighs, or brow, crinkled paper, or diddled my food. I set a trap. I rigged my big butterfly net over the seat and laid a bait of cheddar.One,maybe two minutes,and it was there:black BB eyes catching the scant starlight, whiskers flicking over the mouse-bait cliché.The first time I snapped the net down the mouse escaped through the tangle of steering wheel, net handle, and hands. But it came back! And this time, I got it. I carried it out into the wind a hundred feet or so to the precipice. I considered launching it on a peromyscine parabola out over the gorge, penalty for sleep lost, but in the end I just released it into the basalt scree. The vague persimmon glow in the east looked entirely too much like dawn. But in the blissful solitude, I settled in and hoped for a hard hour’s sleep, possibly two.Actually, only five minutes passed before the gallop of four little feet resumed. On my next trip,in a milkweed swale a little east of Mouse Bluff,my field partner,David Branch,netted a deep-cinnamon female monarch.I gave her tag #09727 and sent her on her way, out across the broad Columbia in a stiff westerly.One month later,a young teenager named Jeremy Lovenfosse rescued an injured monarch from a road along Monterey Bay and took it home. He noticed the tag on its forewing and heeded the instructions to call in its serial number: 09727.The first native tagged monarch ever recovered from Washington State, she helped show how coastal overwinterers can indeed come from far away. In our efforts to conserve the threatened phenomenon of the migratory monarch,we need to know such patterns.Ms.727’s flight path describes a delicious route in my imagination. This one butterfly of passage on her “wings of flame, rising to the sun,” in Jo Brewer’s words, made my own journey whole. But I sometimes wonder who made the...