Monarchs

NATURE'S WINGED JEWELS IN JEOPARDY THE MONARCH

Called simply Angangueo location, this high mountain ridge in the Sierra Chincua range overhangs the town of Angangueo in south-central Mexico. The upland looks much the way others do: cloud-shrouded and densely covered with oyamel trees. But it harbors a distinct difference. It offers a solution to one of Nature's knotty mysteries of migration. Together with two other sites close by, the ridge becomes the destination of scores of millions of monarch butterflies which each year head southward from mainland United States. Today, after eons of protected isolation here and elsewhere, the monarchs and other butterflies suddenly face the possibility of extinction. People are invading their secret hideaways ...and are determined to stay.

THE MONARCH

Each fall the monarch migrates to the Southwestern United States from its summer breeding grounds in the north. Nature never endowed this essentially tropical butterfly with a strategy for surviving the frost and famine of winter in the temperate zone; it must flee to the south where it breeds and feeds in tropical comfort. In the spring it returns home to the north when the milkweeds, which nourish its larva, are growing.

A century of observation informed biologists of the immense scale of the migration. The monarch butterflies, which live throughout the United States and southern Canada, number many millions. Some a relative few-monarchs spend winter in coastal California, hanging in masses in a few groves of trees. But the population is insufficient to account for the entire migration. So where do most of them go?

Canadian biologist Fred Urquhart was obsessed with the mystery. To find out, he devised a method of tagging the butterflies which pointed to their winter whereabouts. "Banding" a butterfly weighing one-fortieth of an ounce without impairing its flight is a delicate challenge. Urquhart perfected a technique using plastic-based gummed labels which was fast, light, and durable, enabling a cadre of dedicated taggers to send an estimated 300,000 labeled butterflies on their way south between 1952 and 1975.

By the early 1970s, after a few hundred tags were returned by amateur and professional collectors, a pattern began to emerge. The trail of butterflies pointed to Mexico. Kenneth Brugger, an engineer and amateur lepidopterist living in Mexico, offered to search for them in 1973. He crisscrossed almost two years the Mexican countryside under Dr. Urquhart's direction. Then Brugger came upon a colony of around 100 million monarchs huddled together like refugees in near-freezing weather in a forest high in the mountains northwest of Mexico City. The discovery of several similar colonies made it clear that the entire population of eastern monarch butterflies spent the winter in just a few dozen acres of forest so thickly crowded they made the forest itself invisible. It was fantastic, and yet here it was, like the Sphinx, challenging science to explain it.

How do all these small, defenseless winged jewels find their way unerringly to just a few patches of mountain forest starting from nearly 2500 miles away, on a trail they've never experienced? Part of the answer lies in a recent discovery: the monarch, it was found, harbors magnetite in its body. Magnetite is a mineral which aligns north under the influence of the earth's magnetic field. Does this mean the monarch can use its biological compass to sense which direction to fly and when it has arrived at the latitude of the Mexican sites? The case is far from proven.

By lodging in a cool, forested environment, the monarch is literally putting itself "on ice," conserving its reserve of fat for the return journey. The forest cover is crucial to survival, serving as both a perch and as protection from the night chill. And as the setting is on the lee side of a mountain, the monarchs are sheltered from storms. But even though all the environmental factors are right, there is a negative note: the sites are few, making the insect vulnerable to encroachment by humanity.

Unfortunately, the butterfly forests acquired another kind of value. In 1981, the monarch's secret wintering site was scheduled for logging until the governor of the state of Michoacán visited it and ordered the work stopped. The move aided the efforts of Mexican and international conservation groups to preserve the area.

But the need to preserve this natural wonder was eclipsed recently by the Mexican financial crisis. Now the people and the country as a whole need the income from the forests of Michoacán. Which are to survive, the butterflies or the people?

Rudolfo Ogarrio, president of Monarca, a recently formed organization to protect the monarch, thinks he has a solu-tion for both: tourism. Fully developed, this resource could be far more valuable to Mexico in the long run than the trees. An infant industry has already started to offer tours of the monarchs' winter home from November to March. But success of the project hangs on the question of whether Mexico-and its creditors-will be willing to forgo quick cash in return for long-term profits.

The loss of the Mexican sites would likely spell big trouble for the monarch in eastern North America. The monarchs west of the continental divide, including those in Arizona, go to several spots in Califor-nia in the winter, not Mexico. But they may be more threatened than the eastern monarch. Their coastal sites are among

MONARCH MIGRATION ROUTES

(Above) Composite lines show the winter migration routes of the monarch butterfly from Canada and eastern North America to the wintering site in Mexico. (Right) The monarch's spring migration routes from the Mexican site to various breeding grounds in the United States. Routes are based on the tagging of thousands of butterflies.

THE MONARCH

The most valuable real estate in the world. Too, because other California sites exist, coastal zoning commissions may assume the loss of one butterfly grove will not be felt. So little is known about the California populations, however, it is impossible to predict how they might be affected by encroachment or outright destruction of their habitats. Pacific Grove, the location of one of the most famous colonies of monarchs, lost one butterfly grove recently despite the existence of an ordinance pro-tecting the butterflies. Construction in the vicinity somehow made the grove unsuit-able and provided a belated lesson in the first rule of ecology: to protect an animal, you must first protect its chosen habitat. If all the coastal commissions assume the monarch has somewhere else to go, extinc-tion could result. The last chapter in the monarch's story has yet to be written, but we can already see the moral: Homo sapiens may be more destructive through igno-rance than intent.

The wonder and the peril of the monarch would not have been discovered in time for a chance at protection without the dedicated study of Dr. Urquhart and his colleagues, professional and amateur. Yet, more needs to be done because the monarch isn't alone in deserving the attention of concerned naturalists. Butterflies in general need to be studied to determine their number, their behavior, and their relationship to the environment which assures their survival.

The recently formed Xerces Society is an organization devoted to the preservation of butterfly species through just such observation. Each year since 1975 they have conducted a "Fourth of July Butterfly Count" in selected localities across the United States. Arizona, for instance, has contributed reports from Ramsey Canyon in the Huachuca Mountains. Analogous to the Audubon Society's bird count, it will eventually provide basic data on the year to year variations in the populations of butterfly species and which, if any, are declining or in need of protection.

Just counting butterflies, however, would not reveal the reason for decline or suggest a remedy. That requires deeper study into the life cycle of each species and how it is being disturbed. A butterfly goes through a four-stage life cycle from egg to caterpillar, pupa, and adult. At each stage in this life cycle, the butterfly is exposed to staggering hazards. Typically, 99 out of 100 end up as some other creature's meal. But this is balanced by great reproductive potential. Females lay enough eggs so that, on average, they replace their number. Such a balance is delicate. A small tilt in the odds against the butterfly spells eventual extinction.

Other means of survival exist. Some species mimic dead leaves or bits of bark with the coloration on the undersides of their wings. When their wings close over their heads, they seem to disappear. Still others foil predators through false eyespots and antennae on their hindwings, drawing attacks to an area which breaks off and allows the butterfly to escape. Beautiful as it is, the butterfly is decorated only for the art of survival.

The study of butterflies remains one of the few sciences to which an amateur can contribute. With patience and a little reading, anyone can gather volumes of useful information. Collecting and rearing butterflies or surveying new habitats are among the most useful amateur pursuits and can ultimately provide the information necessary to save an endangered species. Science and survival aside, most amateur lepidopterists are smitten by the beauty of butterflies and love to stroll the great outdoors with net or camera. Watching butterflies fosters an appreciation of the complex interrelationships of Watching butterflies fosters an appreciation of the complex interrelationships of

THE MONARCH

living things. Butterfly species are highly specialized in coping with their peculiar habitat and are usually found nowhere else. This is especially evident in Arizona where a wide diversity of habitats supports a remarkable number of species for a temperate area.

Habitat types support distinctly different vegetation because of differences in seasonal temperatures and rainfall. Coolest and wettest is the Canadian zone with its spruce and fir forests interspersed with alpine meadows. It is limited in Arizona to the White Mountains, San Francisco Peaks, the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, and several isolated peaks in the southern part of the state. This zone once covered much more of Arizona. But since the end of the last ice age, it has retreated to isolated mountaintops where butterflies characteristic of more northern climes, such as the Alberta Arctic, can be found. Lower down, where the yearly rainfall diminishes to 10 inches, prosper forests of ponderosa pine grading into piñon pine and juniper. The spacing of the trees allows more plants to thrive and butterflies are more common. The piñonjuniper zone tends to be replaced in the south by evergreen oaks of which Madera Canyon near Tucson is typical. Proceeding to drier habitats, sagebrush thrives in the cooler north. Desert grassland and scrub typify the south. These sunny places can host a surprising abundance of butterflies when the season is right and the rainfall plentiful. Along the southern border of Arizona many butterflies from the Mexican plateau are lured north in years of good weather to reside in the moister canyons of the Huachuca, Santa Rita, Chiricahua, and Patagonia mountains. Altogether, some 240 different species find appropriate niches in different Arizona habitats. But finding these butterflies entails some education and exploration. Butterflies are seasonal. Their flight period can be as short as two weeks per year, and it is not always predictable. In Arizona the flights are keyed to seasonal rainfall so the next generation's caterpillars have greens to feed on. If insufficient moisture is present during the normal flight period, butterflies will refuse to emerge from their pupas until the drought ends.

In Arizona there are two groups of emergences timed to take advantage of winter and summer rains. The spring flights occur during the wild flower season of March and April. At higher altitudes it is delayed or merges into a short single season in the Canadian zone. Summer butterflies wait for the monsoon rains in July. Several field guides offer precise flight periods for individual species and help in identification.

Arizona butterflies are grouped in several "families" of related species: milkweed butterflies, satyrs, nymphalids, whites and sulphurs, swallowtails, snout butterflies, lycaenids, metalmarks, and skippers. They are related in the sense that they share a common ancestry. Since butterfly fossils are very rare, relationships are judged on the basis of similarity.

Butterfly identification is simplified by the distinctive wing patterns formed by intricate mosaics of colored scales. The colors are not limited to pigments. The scales can have reflective surfaces formed to tolerances of millionths of an inch. Also, the scales are set to cause constructive interference in light waves and give vivid iridescent blues, greens, and silvers. Engineers have employed the same principles to produce efficient mirrors for lasers.

Certain localities are favored by butterflies and knowing them can be rewarding. Stout-legged watchers find hilltops gathering places for males and females of many species, especially during spring flight. Once mated, they fly off to search for plants on which to lay their eggs, and never return.

The aerobatics of swallowtails is spectacular. They meet in seeming combat, chasing each other high in the air and diving to engage other butterflies.

Damp sand or muddy spots along streams also attract mobs of butterflies. They gather by hundreds on occasion to probe the sand with their drinking-straw mouths for lengthy intervals, but insist on associating with their own kind: swallowtails here, sulphurs there, and small blue butterflies in a third location.

Flowers, of course, are a mainstay of butterfly nutrition, but individual species show preferences, possibly recognizing flowers which provide the best nectar. A butterfly's favored habitat is never far from its foodplant, and a knowledge of botany is invaluable.

Butterfly-watching will certainly benefit the butterflies in the long run, but will it benefit us? Butterflies have been on earth for at least 60 million years and are among the most advanced and successful of insect life. They have faced challenges to survival which have doomed many others to extinction. Our human species has endured far too short a period to judge another's success. But a world unfit for butterflies is likely to be unfit for us all.

Additional Reading Audubon Field Guide to North American Butterflies, by Robert Michael Pyle, Alfred A. Knopf, distributed by Random House, New York, 1981. Butterflies, by Thomas C. Emmel, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1975. The Butterflies of North America, by William H. Howe, Doubleday, Garden City, New York, 1975.

MIMBRES POTTERY AN ARTIST'S PERSPECTIVE

House trailers are parked by the river, fences stretch across the hillsides, and cars roll by on the two-lane blacktop road which now bisects the valley in southwestern New Mexico where the peaceable Mimbres once lived. The entire Mimbres culture vanished nearly a thousand years ago, leaving behind little in the way of architecture but an incredibly rich legacy painted on the inside of simple clay bowls.

Mimbres villages are now only barely discernible mounds scattered with shards of pottery. Excavation of a site is a slow, systematic process. A collapsed roof, then stone and adobe walls, and finally a dirt floor emerge, exposing an ancient house. Directly beneath the floor, which is still cluttered with implements of daily life, reposes a burial. A skeleton lies curled in the fetal position, its head carefully covered with a bowl. Finally, the clay bowl is turned over, revealing a painted interior unseen for nearly a millennium. When I first saw these little-known relics, they spoke to me as a timeless gesture of a distant and unknown people. They were known only to local ranchers and a handful of archeologists, but their message seemed universal. Mimbres bowls were affirming that the human spirit is immortal. The interpretation of Mimbres archaeological finds will always be a matter of speculation, perhaps telling as much about contemporary values as about the Mimbres culture. But we can be confident about the attitudes toward life that we find expressed in these intricately decorated bowls. The Mimbres took intense delight in portraying themselves warmly integrated with the rabbits, antelope, sunflowerseven bugs - of their landscape.

(Colorplate 3) Bowl. Two stylized mountain sheep. Style III, Mimbres Classic Black-on-white. Mattocks site. Height 4% inches (10.5 centimeters), diameter 9½ inches (23.5 centimeters). Maxwell Museum of Anthropology. The University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. (Colorplate 4) Bowl. Man with antler headdress, bat costume. Style III. Mimbres Polychrome. Height 5 inches (12.7 centimeters), diameter 11½ inches (29.2 centimeters). Moderate restoration. Private collection. (Colorplate 5) A. Jet bird pendant, length 1 inch (2.5 centimeters); B. Turquoise pendant, length 1 inch (2.5 centimeters), Mattocks site; C. Abalone fish pendant, length 2 inches (5 centimeters); D. Copper bell, length 1¾ inches (4.4 centimeters). Maxwell Museum of Anthropology, The University of New Mexico, Albuquerque.

MIMBRES POTTERY

This remarkable people created paintings on pottery for 600 years [A.D. 550-1150] with almost no incidents of warfare. In contrast, Europe during the same period was a world wrenched by strife and dominated by severe religious imagery. The central symbol was the judging Christ, and the most vivid scenes were those that portrayed the agonies awaiting the damned in Hell. In the Southwest, meanwhile, the Mimbres were painting images reflecting a world viewed as something of an amiable cosmic circus.

The center of the Mimbres world was the 46-mile-long Mimbres Valley. From the valley floor, the horizon is broken by the irregular lines of the flanking hills. Clouds fill the sky in ever-changing patterns which cast moving shadows on the land; ribbons of lightning and rainbows suggest geometric design. The Mimbres metamorphosed these surroundings into objects that they could hold in their hands. Standing in the valley, one can easily perceive this world as an enormous bowl inverted over one's head.

And so the Mimbres placed bowls over the heads of their ancestors, creating a panorama for the departed. Extraordinarily intense, these images were obviously of enormous importance to the Mimbres. In simple clay bowls, they painted with all the skill and sophistication that Tiepolo employed on a grand scale in casting his divine images onto palatial ceilings. With deft hands and a keen observation of nature, the Mimbres potter revealed the world of fantasy that exists within human perception.

Much like a mandala, which is symbolic of the cosmos, a Mimbres bowl reveals the forces of nature through the vision of the artist. The Mimbres potter was probably a woman, and as the paint flowed from her yucca brush, she began to create not just a rabbit or an antelope but a model of the world. Within the short time known as the Classic period, which spanned perhaps 150 years, the imagery on Mimbres bowls changed dramatically. Initially, the motifs were simple and geometric, suggestive of water and lightning. These abstract patterns were to remain the core of Mimbres design. By the Late Classic period, however, they had evolved into virtuoso drawings that ranged from spartan to ornate.

It seems to me that the bowls which the Mimbres chose to bury with a family member were not an arbitrary selection but had symbolic meaning. Only a small percentage of the painted pottery made by the Mimbres was interred, although the most impressive bowls are usually found in burials. Clearly, these bowls had a special relationship to the dead, taking on some type of ritualistic power. The Mimbres buried their relatives directly beneath the floors of their homes; this custom suggests that they had an acute awareness of their lineage.

At this time, we can only speculate on the ceremonial meaning of the bowls. One of the first creatures repeatedly depicted in bowl designs was the bird, which may have symbolized passage of the spirit of the dead to another world. During the Classic period, animals, such as rabbits and deer and fish appeared in bowl designs. Perhaps a Mimbreño was buried with images that stood as totems for the clan from which he or she traced family ancestry; the vessels found in a single grave may also have been made by potters in villages to which the deceased could link his or her roots.

At a point in the Classic period, potters began depicting a wide variety of animals found in the Mimbres Valley, as well as the creatures that populated their fantasy world. During this period, when highly imaginative and unexpected imagery appeared, it may have been more important to be buried with a bowl from a particular village or one made by a particular potter than to have bowls with specific images.

MIMBRES POTTERY

This is not to say that the bowl patterns did not have special references or meanings. It is entirely consistent with the Mimbres esthetic that many bowls may have had multiple meanings and references. The geometric design of figure 1 suggests a mountain sheep once one sees the slightly embellished version in colorplate 3. This sort of shorthand allows the transition from naturalism to abstraction that seems central to the Mimbres. Sometimes just the opposite occurs and the swirling design in colorplate 3 may also be read as a symbol for a celestial body. In painting it, the artist perhaps saw that the image of a mountain sheep could be superimposed on the celestial pattern by a few brilliantly placed marks. Similarly, the addition of a simple element such as an eye [figure 2] transforms what we perceive as a geometric pattern into a human head. Looking again at the two bowls in figure 1 and colorplate 3 one cannot help wondering if they were produced by the same hand. As interest in Mimbres painting becomes more focused and more bowls become available for study, there is bound to be speculation about the identity of individual painters. Those who present us with specific and unique experiences will stand out as the great central figures of Mimbres pottery. However, there may never be an objective checklist for identifying specific artists. As in learning to recognize an acquaintance's voice on the telephone, only through extended contact and connoisseurship will we begin to recognize individual painters. For example, I recognize the Rabbit Master. She paints other animals, but I identify her work by the expansive fluidity she brings to her rabbits. The distinctive way in which the feet of the animals create an abstract shape or occasionally join together seem to me characteristic of a single artist's work. Even though only the heads of the rabbits are visible in colorplate 1. I believe that the bowls in colorplate 1 and figures 3 and 4 are also creditable examples of her fine work. The Polychrome Priest Painter, as I chose to call her, often draws men costumed as animals, as in colorplate 4 and figures 5 and 6. She separates the ceremonial dress from the body of the priest with the singular technique of outlining the arms and hands with an unpainted area. She usually adds a second color to her palette, a rarity in Mimbres painting. In addition to the similarity of general imagery, her repeated use of the unusual, asymmetrical background makes it clear to me that these bowls were all painted by the same hand. With Mimbres studies still in their formative stage, there are vast speculative areas in interpreting Mimbres work. In some cases, similar bowls may be the work of several members of a family following a master potter's lead, rather than the work of an individual artist. As in the works that I attribute to the Rabbit Master and the Polychrome Priest Painter, artists of transcendent talent and vision appear over the heads of the crowd. Eventually

MIMBRES POTTERY

At left, the Mimbres area and the areas occupied by the three major cultural traditions in the Southwest. Circa A.D. 1100. At right is a site locator map. (Adapted by Judy Skorpil from Mimbres Painted Pottery, by J. J. Brody, University of New Mexico Press 1977 by the School of American Research.) Mimbres Pottery: Ancient Art of the American Southwest, a comprehensive exhibit of unique Native American art, opens at the Heard Museum in Phoenix, Arizona, January 12 and runs through March 11, 1984. On display at this debut of a national tour will be 125 examples of Mimbres bowls. A supporting photographic exhibition features present-day Mimbres Valley archeological sites plus pottery-making tools and utilitarian objects. Costs of the Heard Museum presentation are underwritten by Continental Homes of Phoenix. we may come to recognize these individu-als as readily as we hail old friends.

MIMBRES POTTERY

Master potters were not responsible for all Mimbres bowls. The majority were made by less skillful hands. But regardless of who created them, the images on these bowls are visions that emanate from the human interior. They see the world in playful transformation. For the Mimbres, humanity is not master of the world, but rather an inseparable part of it. In figure 7, the man curled in a fetal position (unborn or dead?) has a “spirit line” that links him to animals with which he obviously has some special relationship. The figure can also be read as a face. The perfect dot on the man's shoulder which functions as an eye undoubtedly has an additional meaning which we may never grasp.

Central to the Mimbres esthetic is a yin-yang type of sensibility. Each delineation of a form simultaneously defines the form and creates the shape of the space around it. Almost invariably, the two elements are so perfectly balanced that figure-ground relationships disappear. There are no negative spaces.

Bowl patterns often evoke a Cubist-like handling of form. The blank white interior of the bowl provides an ambiguous, dynamic field that is sliced and warped by drawing. Geometric images seem firmly anchored to the bowl edges, while representational images walk or fly into the field like dancers on a stage. So adroitly do the images fit into the concave spaces they occupy that when approached front-ally, the bowls sometimes create the illusion of being flat or even convex. Subtle nuances of gesture, scale, and even time are suggested by placement, but whether or not the bowls were meant to be viewed from one position—which way is up? —is often left in doubt.

Mimbres bowl paintings declare that background and foreground are one, that animals and humans are of the same spirit, and that humanity is part of a cosmic process of transformation and change. The finest Mimbres paintings evolved from a tradition that had developed slowly, then bloomed and disappeared in less than 150 years. No one knows how or why the Mimbres vanished, but we do know that they reached a core of human experience that has a timeless veracity.

To a people who lived directly above their ancestors, the bowls are a direct link between the living and the dead. Now, these extraordinary bowls have become a “spirit line” between the Mimbres and ourselves. Like love notes from a distant culture, they reassure us that the human spirit is immortal. Through them, immor-tality is granted to the vanished Mimbres themselves.

Tony Berlant is a renowned sculptor, collagist, and Southwest art aficionado. He is also an expert on Navajo weaving.

Additional Reading The Mimbres People: Ancient Pueblo Painters of the American Southwest, by Steven A. Le Blanc, Thames and Hudson, New York, 1983. Mimbres Painted Pottery by J.J. Brody, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1977. Designs from the Ancient Mimbreños with a Hopi Inter-pretation, by Fred Kabotie, 1982, Flagstaff, Northland Press.

(Colorplate 6) Bowl. Style III, Mimbres Polychrome. Height 4½ inches (11.5 centimeters), diameter 12 inches (30.5 centimeters). Moderate restoration. Private collection. (Colorplate 7) Bowl. Flying insects. Style III, Mimbres Classic Black-on-white. Height 2¼ inches (5.8 centimeters), diameter 6 inches (15.2 centimeters). Light restoration. The University of Colorado Museum, Boulder. (Colorplate 8) Bowl. Man whirling a bull-roarer. Style III, Mimbres Classic Black-on-white, Mattocks site. Height 3½ inches (9 centimeters), diameter 7½ inches (19 centimeters). Maxwell Museum of Anthropology, The University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. (Colorplate 9) Bowl. Pair of quail on a staff. Style III, Mimbres Polychrome. Height 4¾ inches (12 centimeters), diameter 10½ inches (26.6 centimeters). Moderate restoration. Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation, New York.