The monarch butterfly is a world famous member of the Lepidoptera order that is remarkable enough to be described by Aristotle’s term ‘metaphysical,’ his way of understanding the underlying nature of things and creatures of the world.
The monarch is the only one of its kind to annually complete an almost supernatural inter-continental migration of 2,500 miles each way to and from a selective few acres of fir trees on a single Sierra Madre mountainside in Mexico. How on Earth is that possible?
For one thing, it might be said to be a privileged sovereign survivor of its realm by being endowed with a body chemical that is poison to predators. For another, when it leaves our shores for its remote winter destination, the monarch can travel between 50 to 100 miles a day along the Atlantic flyway as the only butterfly that can do so like a bird.
Like others of its kind, the monarch can only see to navigate in daylight hours. It uses coastal peninsulas as visual guides for direction with the position of the sun as its reference point, and possibly the gravitational pull of magnetic fields as a cross reference to navigation.
Many of us have been astonished by the seasonal gathering of a myriad of numbers of monarchs on almost every plant to rest and feed on prominent points of coastal land, and stage up for the next leg of their journey.
At dawn with the rising sun, they can rise up on warming thermals high enough where the air is thin, or to catch a free ride with a favorable prevailing wind over a vast expanse of water. The record distance recorded by electronically tagging an individual monarch was an astonishing total of 265 miles in a single day.
All butterflies reproduce with the same metamorphosis re-birth cycle – from egg to larva, to pupa, and then to adult. Eggs are laid singly or in rows, as in my illustration, and the eventual emerging larva becomes a caterpillar then into a butterfly.
All too soon they must migrate for two reasons: they cannot stand freezing weather and larvae food supply does not grow on winter sites.
Consequently, the migration back here northward must fly along where plants are plentiful. Due to the distance, two generations must reproduce on the way here, in addition to two more during the following summer. Amazingly, those that winter in the same trees are the fourth generation from those that originally left.
Today, even modern scientific methods of research cannot completely account for the monarch’s remarkable unbroken generational chain of migratory heritage of passing the baton of capability through reproduction and the re-birth of natural instincts.
To Native Americans, it was more simple through their keen observation, as well as a living part of the process. They saw it clearly as just one of many unbroken circles of life on Earth orchestrated under planets in the sky where the end of one cycle is but the beginning of another. Call it reincarnation, if you will.
In summary and in closing, my circle of reasoning of this train of thought goes back with me to the opening title of my article with the premise that the incredible journey of the monarch is undeniably metaphysical.
By George B. Emmons
