Sue Halpern - Four Wings and a Prayer: Caught in the Mystery of the Monarch Butterfly

Praise for SUE HALPERNs

Four Wings and a Prayer may be about science, but ultimately it is about the magic of life too. Science may explain many things, but only artsuch as Halpernscan adequately express the feeling that comes from watching millions of butterflies flow overhead in a solid band of orange and black as they surge towards their winter home.

Calgary Herald

Bright. Halpern does a splendid job of giving the big picture of a creature that lives on a bigger scale than other insects.

The New York Review of Books

Halpern has not simply written an appreciation of the worlds most charismatic insects, but a concise reflection on how sciencewith all its human flaws and foibleshappens.

Outside

How we learned what we know [about butterflies] is the real story, and Halpern tells it extremely well.

The Globe and Mail

Halperns contagious interest in these fragile creatures and her earnest dedication to the discovery process make her story thoroughly enjoyable.

Time Out New York

Halpern is an enthusiastic observer. [She] does her best to put science into simple termspeople terms.

Austin American-Statesman

A delightful and magical read.

Tampa Tribune

Halperns elegantly written book is less the story of these strange and beautiful bugs than a meditation on science and knowledge, on their inseparability from the very human passions that drive them.

Mother Jones

Before you finish reading Four Wings and a Prayer, you, too, will likely find yourself casting a glance skyward, hoping to catch a flutter of orange. A lesser writer couldnt have pulled this off.

St. Petersburg Times

SUE HALPERN

Sue Halpern is the author of Migrations to Solitude. Her work has appeared in Granta, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, Audubon, Mother Jones, Rolling Stone, and Orion, among other publications. She lives with her husband and daughter in a small town in the Adirondack Mountains of New York.

ALSO BY SUE HALPERN

Migrations to Solitude

VINTAGE CANADA EDITION, 2002

Copyright 2001 Sue Halpern

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

Published in Canada in 2002 by Vintage Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, and simultaneously in the United States by Vintage Books, New York. Originally published in hardcover in Canada by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, Toronto, in 2001. Distributed by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Vintage Canada and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House of Canada Limited.

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data

Halpern, Sue

Four wings and a prayer : caught in the mystery of the monarch butterfly

Includes bibliographical references.
eISBN: 978-0-307-36380-0

1. Monarch butterflyMigration. I. Title.

QL561.D3H34 2002 595.789 C2002-901139-6

Illustrations: Louise Zemaitis

www.randomhouse.ca

v3.1

To Sophie Crane McKibben
and her devoted scout, Barley,
who brought me outside

Chapter 1

B ILL C ALVERT EASED his truck off Interstate 281 near McAllen, Texas, pulled into a mall parking lot, and drew a knife from his knapsack. It was late in the day, about eight oclock, and he had been driving for the past five hours.

What you want to do is make the cut like this, he said, unfastening his belt buckle and the top button of his jeans. He peeled back the waistband to reveal the smallest of incisions. Nothing too obvious.

Calvert pressed on the fabric, and it opened, exposing a tunnel the width of two fingers. He reached in and extracted a wad of cash that was folded to the size and shape of a stick of gum. Three hundred dollars, it looked like.

You try, he said, handing over the knife.

I got out of the truck and began to slice at the inside of my jeans. People walked by, mothers and fathers towing small children, for the most part, but also the occasional solitary individual or couple, and if they found it odd to see a woman with a knife in her hand fiddling with her pants not two hundred yards from Montgomery Ward, they werent saying.

Its so uncomfortable to walk around with money in your shoes, Calvert was explaining. It gets real damp. And smelly. This is much better.

We were ten miles from the Mexican border. I threaded my money into its hideaway and followed Calvert into the mall restaurant, a Lubys cafeteria. We were the only diners.

I always come here before I go to Mexico, he said happily, sliding his tray along the steam table and overloading it with plates of green beans, broccoli, and peas, all of which looked like they had been through the wash. These are the last green vegetables well see for two weeks. I couldnt say I was sorry.

B ILL C ALVERT is a biologist. Not the kind of biologist who wears a lab coat and not, especially, the kind who has a lab. He works out-of-doors most of the time, observing and cataloging and trying to come to terms with natural phenomena. Among people who study monarch butterflies, which is what he himself has done for the past twenty-five years, Calvert is considered the best field researcher in the pack. This may have something to do with the fact that Bill Calvert isnt really part of a pack. He works by himself, getting grants here and there and leading trips for science teachers and wealthy ecotourists, just scraping by. Although he has a doctorate in zoology, academia doesnt interest him. A real job doesnt interest him. Calvert is fifty-eight years old. Going to Mexico to look for monarchswhat we were doinginterests him.

I TOOK AN aptitude test when I was in my thirties, and I scored two sigmas past a seventeen-year-old for desire for adventure, he said a couple of hours after we crossed the border at Reynosa, as he leapfrogged eighteen-wheelers along the rutted two-lane Mexican highway to Ciudad Victoria, where we planned to stop. It was close to midnight. We had just breezed through two military checkpoints with the words