MonarchButterfly_TiedtotheRestoftheEarth_Cullar_Carol_EaglePassTX_22February2006_Reel2359.wav

Carol Cullar [00:00:00] One of my greatest interests and one that I spend the most time with, with working with kids and whatnot is, for example, the monarch butterfly migration.

Carol Cullar [00:00:11] Eagle Pass is on most maps on Earth simply because there's absolutely nothing here and the map makers don't like that big empty space. And so we, they get that even though we're a little tiny town, they'll put that dot on the map.

Carol Cullar [00:00:28] Well, the irony of that is that, in reference to the monarch butterfly, the monarch butterfly breeds and reproduces and hatches out up around the Great Lakes, all through central United States. And about August, they begin to migrate.

Carol Cullar [00:00:49] And we finally in 1976 discovered where they migrate to, and it's a very small region down in central, in the transvolcanic mountains, in central Mexico.

Carol Cullar [00:01:00] But we have monarch butterflies scattered all over the United States, all the way from the Great Lakes region up into New England, North Carolina, all the eastern coast, down through central Kansas, Nebraska, North and South Dakota.

Carol Cullar [00:01:14] They begin to migrate south. Well, as they do so, they funnel down into a narrower and narrower path. The ones from the central, even New England and Nebraska, all that region in between, they funnel down into what's called the central flyway. By the time it gets here, the central flyway, which has been as wide as half the United States, the central flyway is only about 100 miles wide.

Carol Cullar [00:01:48] Well, Maverick County is 32 miles long. And if you picture a bell curve of distribution - very few monarchs west of Del Rio, almost no monarchs south of Laredo - then you have a hundred-mile path and Maverick County sits right at the peak of the bell curve. Eighty percent of the entire migration passes through this part of the country. Well, if it's a 200-million butterfly migration, eighty percent of that is a lot of butterflies. So starting about the 9th of October until near about the 9th of November, there will be hundreds of thousands of butterflies covering the trees. Every spot you could imagine. All over this county.

Carol Cullar [00:02:41] It is, it's a perfect, perfect metaphor and opportunity for the kids here to realize that we are an important region, that we could, in reality, be very important to an entire species. And it connects us then with people in Canada and people in Mexico.

Carol Cullar [00:03:07] So we're not just a little nothing place on a map, or an empty place on the map. We, I want the kids here to see us as tied to the rest of the earth, that, that the ecology here and the environment here is important nationally or internationally.