The orange plague for our elderly — Symbolic Monarch Migration

THE VISIT

It is now over 40 years that the overwintering colonies of Monarch butterflies were first found by Canadian Doctor Fred Urqhuart and American Doctor Lincoln Pearson Brower after decades of expeditions and research.

For our now elderly people in local families, -a few of them still living with now over one hundred years old-, living up in the mountains where Monarch butterflies have been overwintering for generations and walking across the woods during the winter and the early spring while taking their cattle or sheep back and forth, was not any nice.

They would be little children by then, hearing, while growing up, from their own forefathers, that in this time of the year, this plague of orange “palomas” (palomas is for us local people another name for mariposas –butterflies-), seemed to be no dangerous neither for people, nor for trees and animals in the forest itslef, however, cattle and sheep would get somewhat afraid if while coming across in the forest, any of such butterflies’ “hives”, making the spot actually dark because of the immense quantities occupying large areas in the Oyamel tree nucleous, would do any burst-out causing animals run away in “escapade” hurting someone.

It would take decades, until the late 1980’s, when the extraordinary natural happening would be let known to public worldwide bringing decades more of research and discovery by scientists and volunteer citizen experts regarding the complexities of migrating species in the animal kingdom, being Monarch butteflies considered one of the most extraordinary phenomenons.

Might our almost exceptionally wise and intuitive great-great-grand-parents have belittled the yearly happening, at not having ever imagined that the whole world would turn their eyes to our homeland at the natural miracle taking place winter after winter since ancestral times up today.