Saving a Spectacle

Every autumn, descending like meteors in slow motion, fiery orange clouds set trees along the California coast ablaze with color. The monarch butterfly, Danaus plexippus, eater of poison and male chauvinist of the insect kingdom, comes to California to escape winter, have kids and fatten for the long flight home. But the monarch is threatened, his habitat at risk. Without more help, one of this continent’s great natural phenomena could disappear.

Entomologists have been aflutter this week at the Los Angeles County Natural History Museum, where 45 lectures on monarchal mysteries are being delivered at the Second International Conference on the Monarch Butterfly. They are arguing passionately about pheromones, larval host plants and batesian mimicry, but can hardly say enough about these fascinating creatures. Monarchs are compact packages of chemicals, used for love and war. Monarchs munch milkweeds, so any bird that takes a bite of this butterfly gets a mouthful of cardiac glycocides--enough to make it think twice, or die. If the male monarch’s chemical courtship fails, he resorts to rape.

The monarchs of North America are the only butterflies that conduct regular two-way mass migrations, using the sun to navigate. Some monarchs fly thousands of miles from Canada and the Western United States, attracted by California’s cool coastal groves. Some have overshot the state and ridden jet streams to Australia and Hawaii. And some have flown the other way, to England. But most end up here, millions of them, in 45 coastal locales from San Diego to Mendocino County. No one knows why monarchs pick the trees that they do, but their offspring return to the same trees each year--without their parents who made the trip before. The big, black-veined flyers descend in clusters of up to 200,000, turning their perches into pulsating rods of orange. Monarchs leave their trees to eat, mate and sun. They leave for good in March.

Encroaching civilization threatens the monarchs’ winter homes, and hence the monarchs. The trees of eight monarch nesting areas have been destroyed in the past two years--some because of ignorance, some because of neglect. Condominiums, shopping malls and other hallmarks of progress threaten the rest. The Monarch Project has been waging a splendid campaign to save the areas, mostly by persuading local zoning boards to prevent developers from chopping down monarch trees. Most developers, in fact, have been cooperative. The trees in which monarchs land are few and concentrated, and so are easy to save, and the brilliant clusters enhance the value of the property. But the monarchs need more help.

The Legislature could save the monarchs by incorporating their habitat into the Coastal Zone Act and Natural Resources Code. That would make it illegal to destroy monarch trees.

Not all monarchs head for California. The ones that migrate from the Eastern United States go to Mexico. For the moment, California is being outdone by the government of Mexico, which has established sanctuaries for its many millions of migrating monarchs. For the Legislature, tangled up in a knot of arcane subjects, this is its chance: For little cost and little effort it can save one of nature’s brilliant spectacles.