If only the monarchs continued down to Costa Rica, one of the world's most environmentally enlightened countries, or if they spent the winter in, say, the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee, it would be possible to protect their sites. But instead they land in a country whose natural resources have been plundered for centuries, first by Spain and then, thanks to the granting of large mining and timbering concessions by President Porfirio Diaz around the turn of the century, by the United States.

"Our word for wilderness, maleza, means 'a bad thing,'" Gottfried explained. "Land to Mexicans is worthless unless it is being used." 

Brower and Calvert soon realized that the first priority was to safeguard the colonies. The forest was fast disappearing, particularly at the Rosario site, where the village carne right up to the trees in which the butterflies roosted. But to get anybody in Mexico City to care was a monumental task. The politicians had no environmental awareness; the notion of stewardship of the natural world was simply not in their mind-set. "We don't even have a word for accountability," a Mexican friend told me. "We don't say, 'I dropped it,' but' Se cayo'-'It decided to fall.'"

   Who was going to take seriously two American lepidopterists telling them, "You have the Eighth Wonder of the World in your backyard and guess what it is: a bunch of butterflies"? The only solution Brower could think of was to "overwhelm the politicians with data" and to provide them with an unassailable "scientific rationale for not cutting down the forest." He and Calvert set up weather stations in the colonies and determined that it seldom froze there, because the forest acted like a blanket; below the forest, where the trees had been cleared, it froze regularly. Cutting a single tree in the forest, Brower argued, was like cutting a hole in your sleeping bag when you were camping out. Any butterflies directly exposed to the night sky would be killed. Calvert and Brower wrote a paper on the effect of forest thinning on monarch mortality that Gottfried said was "the linchpin" in persuading the Mexican government to include the colonies in its national-park system.

Urquhart's 1976 National Geographic article also attracted new friends for the monarch-a group of dynamic young Mexican entrepreneurs who had weekend homes in the Valle de Bravo, a lakeside resort town 20 miles south of the butterfly area. Highly educated, all fluent in English, the members of this group shared a love of the outdoors. As Gottfried explained, "We all saw the article and wondered, What the hell is this and where is it?"

Among them was Rodolfo Ogarrio, a lawyer who today runs the Mexican Foundation for Environmental Education, which is chaired by Manuel Arango, one of the few wealthy environmentalists in Mexico. "The first time my family became exposed to the butterflies was on March 21, 1973," the charismatic 54-yearold Ogarrio recalled in his office in Mexico City's fashionable Colonia Polanco. "We were trekking in the western foothills of the Nevado de Toluca volcano, and on top of a hill called Cerro de las Palomas, above 10,000 feet, we found thousands of monarchs in a field of milkweed. We had no idea what it meant until three years later, when the National Geographic article appeared."

After reading the article, Ogarrio's cousin Gina Ogarrio became obsessed with finding the location of the sites. She approached Urquhart, who told her it was "impossible. The colony is much too fragile." But Gina persisted, threatening to shadow his every movement, until he relented and gave her the name of a local man who would take them to Sierra Chincua. "It was something that changed our lives," remembered Ogarrio, who was taken there by Gina. "It was a perfect blue day. All the butterflies were flying because of the bright sunshine. We had no information or understanding of anything, except for what we had read in the article. The experience was sensory, almost religious. I remember this scene of us lying on our backs and watching the butterflies, a silent river of wings, fly down to a small creek to drink, thousands of living pieces of stained glass against the bright-blue sky moving in all directions. We stayed hours in silence, not speaking, absorbing something we realized from the very beginning was sacred. Another couple with us gathered some of the butterflies on the forest floor to show their children. Back in Mexico City they opened the bag and the butterflies flew out. They were alive! And then we realized that in our ignorance we could have trampled hundreds of what we considered to be dead butterflies.

"I left with the thought, This has to be protected. This is not a place where humans can just walk in, and it just will have to happen. This is something that we have to do. Gina swore she would never go back and she hasn't. What I did was start groping my way to do something. I was already searching, desperately, for something larger than my life and my job. And because we were working for something larger than ourselves, there often happened acts of synchronicity, in which difficulties that seemed insurmountable solved themselves so we could advance. There were so many positive coincidences."

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