Troymedia.com Columnist, Mike Robinson published a fantastic story titled: “On the trail of a monarch deep in the heart of Mexico”, which describes how he took rough roads, with an eye on bandidos , in search of the increasingly endangered species.
“We’re going to see the monarch butterflies at the Cerro Pelon Butterfly Sanctuary.” What? When my friend Scott said he’d booked us into JM’s Butterfly B&B in the remote Mexican village of Macheros, Donata Guerra, Estado de Mexico, I admit to some misgivings.
“It’s just a fourhour drive south and west of San Miguel de Allende, to the Mexican Sierra Madre range, at about 2,600 metres above sea level – the butterflies though are at 3,000 metres, about 10,000 feet. We can drive with Horacio in his van.
There’s one rough bit of road we shouldn’t drive at night because of “bandidos”, but we’ll stay an extra day and only drive in daytime.” Bandidos? Rough bit of road? To see butterflies? My first reaction was to look up the destination on the web and do some research on safety. It immediately turned out that the proprietors of JM’s Butterfly B&B, Joel Moreno Rojas and Ellen Sharp, had a magnificent website, full of useful information. I was also able to read David Suzuki’s latest piece on monarch butterfly conservation, and to discover that Catherine McKenna, Canada’s federal minister of Environment and Climate Change, had recently been to Mexico to see the mariposa monarca.
Once again, Scott had hit a marvellous hot topic for our annual threecouple trip to San Miguel de Allende. On the conservation front, the news was not promising. Since the 1990s, Suzuki reports that the eastern monarch population has declined by 90 per cent. Each year, the monarchs make a threegeneration flutter to Canada (arriving in a broad band from south Saskatchewan to the Maritimes), launching from four high altitude sites in the Sierra Madre early in March.
Source: http://www.troymedia.com/
