Once a Butterbiker, Always a Butterbiker

Go figure, I thought as hundreds of monarchs streamed across Texas’ Highway 90. Their confetti-like shadows swirled around me. “Now we cross paths!” I laughed. In 2017 I had biked 10,200 miles from Mexico to Canada and back, doing my best to follow the migration. I had seen 722 adults during my ten-month trip. Now in Texas, leading Adventure Cycling’s Southern Tier bike tour across the USA (a bike tour that had nothing to do with butterflies), I was seeing thousands. In just a few hours I was to see more monarchs than during the entirety of my Butterbike tour. Better late than never, I decided.

When our group first left San Diego, CA on September 16th I had hoped to see a handful of monarchs on the 3,100 mile route to St. Augustine, FL. As the leader, however, my goal had been to facilitate an adventure, not follow the migration. That doesn’t mean I wasn’t thinking about monarchs. I knew we would cross Texas in early October, and my fingers were crossed. I hoped our eastbound route would intersect with at least a few of migrants headed southbound on their fall migration.

This time around the goal of my trip was less about monarchs and more about crossing the country.

We were right on schedule when we crossed into western Texas in October. There the horizon bled to hazy, blue mountains and the plants were defensively armed. I didn’t think there would be monarchs in the desert-like landscape, but I was wrong. As we raced from lonely town to lonely town on Texas’ solitary, chip-sealed shoulders I began to spot monarchs. The first in Texas, on October 12th, was cause for celebration.

I wasn’t expecting monarchs in the rugged vastness of Western Texas.

Yet, I began to see a monarch here or there as I got closer to Sanderson, TX.

A reunion. I paused to watch the monarch stumble in the wind. A brilliantly painted female, she was likely the great-great-great-great-great-great granddaughter of monarchs I had finished with in 2017. She was a testament to our planet’s engineering as well as a testament to everyone who has planted milkweed, fought for public land, opted not to mow, and grown organic crops. She, just like her ancestors, was still invited to promenade with the wind. Both new and a memory, she brought me back to my trip.

Perhaps the monarchs I were seeing were the great-great-great-great-great-great grandchildren of the monarchs I had biked with in 2017.

I felt lighter as I continued down the highway, scanning the blue skies for more orange wings. I counted eight in the next four miles. Then I saw a dead monarch, or nearly dead monarch. It was another female. She was still flapping her wings, but they were broken. Her trip would end in Texas, on the edge of a highway. By the time I got to Sanderson, TX a small town not far from the Mexican border in the scrubland of west Texas, I had seen 25 monarchs alive and 10 dead or dying. That count was about to change.

At the gas station I stopped to get groceries, and was greeted by devastation. Dozens of dead monarchs littered the ground. Broken-winged monarchs flapped without getting air. In the hood of a car four monarchs sat like fish caught in a net. I began to pick them up. My guess was that they had been struck then stuck to the fronts of passing cars. At the slow speed of the parking lot, they had fallen to the ground. A women looked at me, asking a question without words. I responded, “Look at all these monarchs. They are migrating to Mexico right now, but they are getting killed by cars.” The women looked sad. She said that she had just driven somewhere to see a fall roost. She hadn’t noticed that the monarchs had come to her instead. “Drive slower,” I desperately asked as she got back into her car.

In less than a minute I collected a dozen dead and dying monarchs in the gas station just outside Sanderson, TX.

Leaving Sanderson on October 13th, I was prepared to see another handful of monarchs. What I found instead was thousands. I couldn’t begin to stop and record each monarch. Instead, I tried counting them by the mile. I would bike and count, and at the end of the mile record the number of monarchs I saw flying towards Mexico (the first nine miles saw: 30, 87, 37, 75, 78, 29, 78, 170, and then 120). I also recorded the number I saw dead or dying on the pavement (I found: 15, 3, 2, 20, 60, 9, 13, 19, 4, and then 25). Had it been a bike tour to follow the monarchs I would have stopped so much that I likely wouldn’t have made it farther than those early-day miles. As it was, I had 75 miles to go, so I compromised. I kept careful count for one mile sections every five. In that way, the day passed and highway 90 carried me east as the monarchs passed overhead southbound.

Between mile 20 and 25 I stopped on a bridge. It was not my mile for counting, but I had to stop. Never had I seen so many road-killed monarchs. There were dozens of them dead and dying. Again, I wanted to do something, but I didn’t know what that something was. In the wake of a passing truck I watched more monarchs swirl violently, like leaves caught in the surf of an angry ocean, and then fall.

Hundreds of dead monarchs on this bridge. Many are still alive, but their wings are broken and they can’t fly.

The grating rumble of a truck pierced my ears, and like an aftershock it startled a gathering of monarchs I had not yet detected. They had been clumped and camouflaged in a roadside acacia tree. The cloudy, cold temperatures had kept many stationary, but when disturbed by the noise they sprang forth into a cloud of several thousand flapping, silhouetted specks. For a moment they hung suspended, not sure exactly what to do, and then they returned to the branches. Peace returned. Like a library being reorganized, the monarchs and their thousands of stories from the north, found calm. I had found a roost.

My first real roost as a passing truck unsettled the butterflies.

Each fall the monarchs cluster each evening and through the colder days as they make their migration south. Many mini-versions of their sanctuaries in Mexico. On my Butterbike trip I had seen clusters of five or ten monarchs, never enough to bend branches. I was both elated and horrified to finally see one. Their acacia tree hung over the highway. Each time the monarchs left the safety of the cradled canopy they were vulnerable to passing cars. Each speeding car stole another brush-stroke of orange from the forests of Mexico.

Watching the carnage, I became desperate. When the next car barreled toward us I flapped my arms. Catching the driver’s attention, I waved my arms up and down, begging the driver to slow down. Instead they hugged the center lane, judgement in their eyes. With their wide berth, several more monarchs fell.

That was when I started to cry. Okay, not cry, sob. I sobbed for every monarch that was to be erased by our need to be here and there on the very same day. I sobbed for the monarchs that would never get to lay eggs and hand the baton to their kids. I sobbed for the pointlessness of their deaths. I was gulping at air, trying to do something, anything. I dragged a large stick in the road. Dangerous? I didn’t care. I just wanted cars to slow down. The difference between 75 mph and 50 mph was life and death. There was nothing more I could do, so with a heavy heart I carried on.

Not long after restarting, a cop showed up. I assume one of the drivers that saw me (but didn’t slow down) called and reported me. He pulled off the road and leaned out the open window. He was kind and curious. My heart was breaking and so I told him. I laid it all out. My fear of climate change. My sorrow at mass extinction. My dread of the future. My hopelessness. My frustration at a world where only humans matter. My shame at not being able to do more. The words of Greta Thunberg, the young climate activist from Switzerland, echoed in my head. She had given a passionate speed to the UN during the 2019 climate talks. "You are failing us,” she told the panel, “but the young people are starting to understand your betrayal. The eyes of all future generations are upon you. And if you choose to fail us, I say: We will never forgive you.”

My heart was so heavy that day, heavy with the weight of dead monarchs. Their uncertain future as precarious as our own. My reaction seems almost silly now, but thinking back, about the day that should have been filled with wonder at being in just the right place at just the right time, I am still drawn to tears. “Why can’t people just slow down?” I asked the cop. He had sat there, likely wondering if I was a danger to myself or others, and took in my words. I think he knew I needed to release some of my pain, and I was grateful that he was there to witness what the world was doing to me. To us. I knew that the solution was easy. We just need to slow down.

I continued to count monarchs every five miles. There was only one mile without any dead ones (that I saw). At another bridge I noticed a swirling mass of monarchs just off the road. I parked, found a spot in the fence to sneak through, and I tiptoed through the forest. A hundred feet from the road was a smaller roost of many hundreds of monarchs. Most sat with closed wings, the dull orange nearly absorbed by the trees. A few, however, graced me with open wings. Bright orange decorated the juniper tree. They were on the south side of Highway 90. They were survivors of another road crossing. For now they were safe enough for me to enjoy their company without dread.

This roost was smaller, but also further off the road. It was less stressful to watch them.

The next day, October 14th, I continued my counts. Both alive and dead sightings dropped off. I found 5-10 alive monarchs and 1-4 dead monarchs every mile I counted. It became easier to breathe. Twice I rode by shrubs doused in white flowers. A perfume saturated the air, and it was obvious that the monarchs were fans. They sipped nectar, a fuel stop in their migration north. “Be careful when you cross the highway,” I advised.

A rich-smelling flower that captivated the monarchs.

I am not the only person to call this danger to attention. A 2019 study by Kantola et al (2019) suggests that road mortality may contribute to monarch population declines. Scientists estimated roadkill for the central flyway (Oklahoma to Mexico) during the fall migration. Roadkilled monarchs averaged 3.4 per 100 meter stretches (1600 meters in a mile). Southwest Texas was a roadkill hotspot, with 66 dead monarchs per 100 meter stretch. It makes sense that their numbers were higher than mine. I was speeding by, likely missing many. I was also surveying only half the road. I figure that on the mile stretch where I saw 170 dead monarchs, that the true amount was closer to 400 or even 500 (25-32 dead per 100 m).

The study went on to extrapolate their findings to estimate the number of roadkill monarchs thought the entire central flyway (from OK south). They estimate that millions of monarchs are dying each year from traffic, as much as 2-3% of the population. They went on to suggest that the highest density of dead monarchs, just where I had seen them, was a result of a funneling effect. Monarchs are in higher densities as their migration corridor narrows. In some ways, this seems like good news. We might not be able to decrease speed limits over the entire migration, but we could identify hot spots, and when monarchs begin to appear we could lower the speed limits. Like a construction zone, it would be a relatively short stretch that could save lives.

There was a silver lining in seeing so many dead. If 2-3% of the population was killed by cars, then the more dead I saw, the more monarchs there were. The winter after my tour 2.48 hectares of monarchs were counted in Mexico. The count has not yet been done this winter, but projections are saying a much higher population (though less than last year’s 6 hectare, ten-year record). With more migrating monarchs, we are simply more likely to cross their paths. A double-edged sword.

The story of my second, unexpected Butterbike tour did not end in Texas. By eastern Texas seeing a monarch became a rarity. Same with Alabama and Louisiana. We hadn’t biked fast enough to catch the concentration of east coast monarchs that are typically several weeks behind the monarchs of the central flyway. As we cycled the coast of Florida’s panhandle the monarchs, however, again began to appear. On the long spit that extended, by bridge, to Dauphin Island, a carpet of white flowers hosted hundreds of monarchs. On the shore-lined bike paths near Pensacola, monarchs wandered like tourists between palms, condominiums, and sandy beaches.

Along the Gulf of Mexico the monarchs began to reappear in mass (There are at least 15 monarchs in this photo).

I had several theories for these sightings, and emailed Monarch Watch Director, Dr. Chip Taylor, about what I was seeing. My first thought was that these monarchs had likely been born on the East Coast, and had followed the coastline en route to Mexico. They lagged behind, but were possibly still en route to the Mexican sanctuaries. Dr. Taylor explained that some monarchs make it to Florida and decide to stay. Since I was passing through before any killing freezes (in general, temperatures below 28 degrees), the monarchs were doing okay. Many would likely die in cold snaps throughout winter but some could survive. Dr. Taylor figured that some monarchs had likely been surviving in Florida during select winters for a long time. As the climate crisis continues, Florida is predicted to have warmer winters, making it more suitable for monarch to survive the winter there (as well as a host of disturbing consequences too).

Across Florida I saw 1-10 monarchs most days, all the way to the ocean. On November 19th we dipped our wheels in the salty surf of the Atlantic Ocean at St. Augustine, FL. The sun was bright and welcoming, giving shadows to the pelicans that skimmed the crashing waves and us as we dragged our bikes across the beach.

Some of our group at the ocean, 3,200 miles from San Diego, CA.

After our goodbyes and a long walk along the beach I was crossing the fragile sand dunes back to the parking lot on a boardwalk. The higher vantage let me scan the sand dunes spilling towards the Atlantic Ocean and the monarchs nectaring on the yellow flowers that clung to the soft slopes. Without taking a step, I counted five monarchs. After seeing thousands on my cross-country tour, I was not yet bored. Once a butterbiker, always a butterbiker, I thought. Whatever happened next, it was good to know that there were still monarchs to bike with. Still monarchs left to save.