Subject
NYRB review of Pyle's _Chasing Monarchs_ (fwd)
Date
Body
From: Galya Diment <galya@u.washington.edu>
http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/08/15/reviews/990815.15kellert.html
August 15, 1999
Nothing but Net
A naturalist journeys more than 9,000 miles as he tracks the
emigration of monarch butterflies.
Related Link First Chapter: 'Chasing Monarchs'
By STEWART KELLERMAN
We tend to think of butterflies as wusses,
flashy-dressing dilettantes that can't stand on their own six feet. But if
we had to face a few of the perils these flimsy-looking creatures deal
with routinely (killer chickadees, hood ornaments, slice-and-dice praying
mantises), we'd be having, well, butterflies.
Danaus plexippus, better known as the monarch, may be the toughest of a
tough bunch. In addition to dodging Murder Inc., a monarch migrates
hundreds, perhaps thousands, of miles to perpetuate the species. A
migratory biped, H. lepidopterist, is almost as tough, and Robert Michael
Pyle is a particularly fine specimen. In ''Chasing Monarchs,'' he's not
satisfied with merely pursuing, netting and tagging monarchs -- he lives
with them for 57 days and 9,462 miles.
Pyle, a prolific author of nature books, including the Audubon Society
Field Guide to North American Butterflies, presents the orange-and-black
monarch vivid, sometimes brutal, detail. Here he describes a mating, more
''ravishment'' than courtship:
''The male simply attacks the female on the wing, drives her
to the ground and wrestles with her. He will maneuver the female onto her
back, wings spread, and cover her -- a face-to-face embrace I've never
seen among other butterflies. In a couple of minutes he will achieve
copulation by enfolding the tip of her abdomen within the handlike
claspers of his own rear end, and inserting his aedeagus. Then he will fly
straight up, carrying her in a postnuptial flight . . . into a tree. There
they will remain in coitus for an hour, two, or all night long.''
Pyle sets out from his home in the Pacific Northwest in late summer
1996 to study the migration of monarchs between their northern breeding
grounds and southern roosting sites: ''I'll find a monarch. I will watch
it. If it flies, I'll follow it as far as I can. When I lose it, I'll take
its vanishing bearing -- the direction in which it disappears. Then I will
quarter the countryside, by foot and by road, until I find the next
suitable habitat . . . and do it again.''
In his Honda Civic, with a sleeping bag, a camp stove and a
butterfly net named Marsha, Pyle travels a zigzag route from British
Columbia down the West Coast and through the mountain states into Mexico.
Among other things, he hopes to disprove the common belief that monarchs
breeding west of the Rockies winter only in California and those to the
east only in Mexico. In the end, he feels he's gathered enough evidence
to show that some Western monarchs do indeed go to Mexico.
Along the way, he shares his encyclopedic knowledge of
monarchs, from the more esoteric stuff (they can glide for 1,000 hours on
140 milligrams of fat) to things any schoolchild knows (dining on milkweed
makes them poisonous to many predators). As much as he admires the
monarchs' resilience, Pyle isn't sure they'll survive bulldozers,
pesticides and -- this really bugs him -- mass releases of alien
butterflies at weddings and such.
''Chasing Monarchs'' is one-third memoir, one-third nature
walk, one-third travelogue and one-third research paper -- yes,
four-thirds of a book. An editor should have blue-penciled the surplus, no
matter how interesting some of it is. Pyle, who has co-edited a collection
of Vladimir Nabokov's writings on butterflies, can get carried away on
flights of lyricism, but when he's not trying to out-Nabokov Nabokov, he
can be quite moving, as in this description of female monarchs at the end
of a northward migration:
''Their wings, those translucent tissues that have carried
them 200 or 2,000 miles already, lose their scales and their color. They
grow tattered, torn, bush-ripped, bird-struck. The wings still work for
flying, if not so fast, efficiently or high. But a female no longer needs
to fly high, to soar and glide great distances. Her only need now is to
skip and hop and flutter from field to roadside, bush to herb, to palp the
air and the green spring for the next scrap of milkweed on which to
deposit her precious eggs.''
Stewart Kellerman is a writer who lives in rural
Connecticut.
http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/08/15/reviews/990815.15kellert.html
August 15, 1999
Nothing but Net
A naturalist journeys more than 9,000 miles as he tracks the
emigration of monarch butterflies.
Related Link First Chapter: 'Chasing Monarchs'
By STEWART KELLERMAN
We tend to think of butterflies as wusses,
flashy-dressing dilettantes that can't stand on their own six feet. But if
we had to face a few of the perils these flimsy-looking creatures deal
with routinely (killer chickadees, hood ornaments, slice-and-dice praying
mantises), we'd be having, well, butterflies.
Danaus plexippus, better known as the monarch, may be the toughest of a
tough bunch. In addition to dodging Murder Inc., a monarch migrates
hundreds, perhaps thousands, of miles to perpetuate the species. A
migratory biped, H. lepidopterist, is almost as tough, and Robert Michael
Pyle is a particularly fine specimen. In ''Chasing Monarchs,'' he's not
satisfied with merely pursuing, netting and tagging monarchs -- he lives
with them for 57 days and 9,462 miles.
Pyle, a prolific author of nature books, including the Audubon Society
Field Guide to North American Butterflies, presents the orange-and-black
monarch vivid, sometimes brutal, detail. Here he describes a mating, more
''ravishment'' than courtship:
''The male simply attacks the female on the wing, drives her
to the ground and wrestles with her. He will maneuver the female onto her
back, wings spread, and cover her -- a face-to-face embrace I've never
seen among other butterflies. In a couple of minutes he will achieve
copulation by enfolding the tip of her abdomen within the handlike
claspers of his own rear end, and inserting his aedeagus. Then he will fly
straight up, carrying her in a postnuptial flight . . . into a tree. There
they will remain in coitus for an hour, two, or all night long.''
Pyle sets out from his home in the Pacific Northwest in late summer
1996 to study the migration of monarchs between their northern breeding
grounds and southern roosting sites: ''I'll find a monarch. I will watch
it. If it flies, I'll follow it as far as I can. When I lose it, I'll take
its vanishing bearing -- the direction in which it disappears. Then I will
quarter the countryside, by foot and by road, until I find the next
suitable habitat . . . and do it again.''
In his Honda Civic, with a sleeping bag, a camp stove and a
butterfly net named Marsha, Pyle travels a zigzag route from British
Columbia down the West Coast and through the mountain states into Mexico.
Among other things, he hopes to disprove the common belief that monarchs
breeding west of the Rockies winter only in California and those to the
east only in Mexico. In the end, he feels he's gathered enough evidence
to show that some Western monarchs do indeed go to Mexico.
Along the way, he shares his encyclopedic knowledge of
monarchs, from the more esoteric stuff (they can glide for 1,000 hours on
140 milligrams of fat) to things any schoolchild knows (dining on milkweed
makes them poisonous to many predators). As much as he admires the
monarchs' resilience, Pyle isn't sure they'll survive bulldozers,
pesticides and -- this really bugs him -- mass releases of alien
butterflies at weddings and such.
''Chasing Monarchs'' is one-third memoir, one-third nature
walk, one-third travelogue and one-third research paper -- yes,
four-thirds of a book. An editor should have blue-penciled the surplus, no
matter how interesting some of it is. Pyle, who has co-edited a collection
of Vladimir Nabokov's writings on butterflies, can get carried away on
flights of lyricism, but when he's not trying to out-Nabokov Nabokov, he
can be quite moving, as in this description of female monarchs at the end
of a northward migration:
''Their wings, those translucent tissues that have carried
them 200 or 2,000 miles already, lose their scales and their color. They
grow tattered, torn, bush-ripped, bird-struck. The wings still work for
flying, if not so fast, efficiently or high. But a female no longer needs
to fly high, to soar and glide great distances. Her only need now is to
skip and hop and flutter from field to roadside, bush to herb, to palp the
air and the green spring for the next scrap of milkweed on which to
deposit her precious eggs.''
Stewart Kellerman is a writer who lives in rural
Connecticut.