Mexico butterfly reserve damaged
Copyright 2000, Associated Press
September 13, 2000
When butterfly defender Homero Aridjis walked the mountains of the Monarch reserve in southern Mexico in the 1970s, he found "a blanket of green." The last time he went, some tourists wore paper masks against dust rising from deforested land.
A new study of aerial photographs taken over the last 29 years shows damage or destruction of 44 percent of the fir forest that serves as wintering grounds for the Monarch butterfly in its annual migration from the United States and Canada.
"I think it's impacting the Monarch now," said Lincoln Brower, a zoologist and the foremost expert on the 3,000-mile migration that takes successive generations of butterflies back to the same wintering grounds each year.
The cool shade of the forest - in which the Monarchs drape themselves by the millions like a spectacular orange-and-black carpet - is a necessary piece of their migratory puzzle.
But it's being cut down piecemeal by local communities and big logging companies.
"We're starting to see (butterfly) colonies breaking up earlier" and heading back north in March, potentially exposing them to killing late frosts in the United States, Brower said.
He also reports that when dusty, dry winds blow through thinning forests, the butterflies are more likely to fly down to nearby lowlands streams to drink - thus wasting precious energy needed for the trip back.
Forestry expert Guillermo Castilleja, who worked on the study carried out by Mexico's National Autonomous University and the World Wildlife Fund, predicts that in 10 or 20 years, the fir forest could be reduced to patches of trees separated by bare ground. Brower said in 50 years there could be "basically nothing left."
"The situation is much worse than we thought," Castilleja said, explaining that the logging could eventually affect the Monarch's delicate metabolic balancing act.
The butterflies store fuel during the summer; after they reach Mexico, there is no evidence that they eat anything.
The reserve - basically, a Canadian-type northern fir forest that has survived since the Ice Age on a string of mountain tops in the tropics - serves the Monarchs as what Brower calls "a blanket and an umbrella" against temperature extremes and dryness.
Cold and rain can kill them; heat and dryness can use up their energy reserves.
For Aridjis, who grew up near the reserves in central Michoacan state and who went on to become an early proponent of protecting the forest, the problems are quintessentially Mexican: corruption, lax law enforcement and vested interests.
"There is generalized problem, of social demands and a population explosion," said Aridjis. Unlike U.S. parks which have no permanent residents, about 60,000 people, including Masagua Indians, live in the Monarch reserves.
Those inhabitants fear losing income from logging - but also face land erosion, and the drying-up of wells due to deforestation.
Mexico's answer is to create the first-ever trust-fund in Mexico for such a reserve, to guarantee local people a payment for each tree they don't cut down. An anonymous donor has already offered, through the World Wildlife Fund, to contribute $5 million but much more is needed.
The government also hopes to add a 100,000-acre buffer zone around the current 40,000-acre reserve.
So far, and despite a joint pledge by Mexico, the United States and Canada to protect the Monarch, the forest has largely been left to its fate, despite the fact the area was declared a nature reserve in 1986.
"In analyzing the photos, we saw that there wasn't much difference between forests that were in the `protected area' and those that weren't," Castilleja said. "The good thing is that the fir is a fine species, and in 20 or 25 years we could start to see it growing back."