MonarchButterfly_Astonishing_Calvert_Bill_BarHarborME_30June2023_Reel4160.mp3

Bill Calvert [00:00:01] I had a position at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, studying tent caterpillars. And I would occasionally go across town and attend lectures at Amherst College.

Bill Calvert [00:00:14] And there I met Lincoln Brower, and he was studying monarchs at the time, and he needed a sample taken during the migration.

Bill Calvert [00:00:26] And I had just migrated up there from Texas, and I knew Texas pretty well. I didn't know much about monarchs at the time. But I went down and I learned, to my dismay, that the monarch had already passed through Texas.

Bill Calvert [00:00:45] But I caught up with them in Mexico, in Bustamante, Mexico, made a collection, sent them back to Lincoln, and sort of got established as someone who could really help him with his research. And also, I began to study the monarch myself.

Bill Calvert [00:01:06] Lincoln Brower had been studying monarchs for decades before I met him. He was the one who did the experiments with birds, feeding them monarch butterflies that were infused with the cardiac glycosides, and then photographing their reaction to it. That appeared in Scientific American, I think, sometime in the 1960s, sort of establishing him as a preeminent researcher with monarchs - this notion that the monarchs were protected by the ingestion of chemicals that they obtained from their food plant.

Bill Calvert [00:01:52] He and I continued this research. He funded the trip to Mexico, where we rediscovered the location of the monarch sites.

Bill Calvert [00:02:02] We had two important clues. The person who discovered the monarch colonies was Fred Urquhart, and his, actually, the real person who discovered it was Kenneth Brugger, who worked in Mexico and who worked with Urquhart.

Bill Calvert [00:02:20] Urquhart published in two different locations two important clues.

Bill Calvert [00:02:26] One of them was that the colonies were located in the state of Michoacan, and the second was that it was at 3000 meters altitude.

Bill Calvert [00:02:36] And we scrounged around a number of libraries in the Amherst area and found a good map of that area of Michoacan, Mexico, and were able to isolate a couple of mountain tops that fit the description.

Bill Calvert [00:02:59] And we went to the town of Angangueo, presented a sample butterfly to the mayor, and he understood immediately what we were looking for. He was a little confused about why we were looking for it.

Bill Calvert [00:03:11] But anyway, he located his nephew and the nephew took us up on the mountain the next day and we searched and searched and searched. And at the end of the day, we found a colony.

Bill Calvert [00:03:24] It was astonishing.

Bill Calvert [00:03:26] I mean, we arrived in late afternoon and they were coming back into their roosts and, you know, the entire forest was just colored golden with these living creatures flying back into the forest and forming their roosts.

Bill Calvert [00:03:43] And of course, the majority were already there. The majority of butterflies don't leave the roosts during the day. They just remain dormant. But a certain percentage go out each day and then they fly back at night. And that's what we witnessed. They were flying back at night.

Bill Calvert [00:04:00] It was just ... I can't think of enough superlative words.

Bill Calvert [00:04:02] It was just astonishing.