Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve
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How it came to be
The Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve covers 56,259 ha of forested mountains about 100 km north-west of Mexico City. Each autumn possibly up to a billion monarch butterflies from across North America gather here, turning the trees orange and bending the branches with their weight. In spring they fly north on an eight-month round trip to eastern Canada, during which four generations are born and die.
The wintering grounds were long sought by the Canadian zoologist Fred Urquhart and his wife Norah. From 1937 they tagged butterflies' wings to trace the routes, but the autumn trail vanished in Texas. On 9 January 1975, Kenneth Brugger and his wife Catalina Trail, then known as Cathy Aguado, two naturalists they had recruited, found the first known wintering site on a mountaintop in Michoacán.
The first protection was decreed in 1980, and a presidential decree of 1986, pressed for by the poet Homero Aridjis, protected five mountains. In 2000 the reserve was enlarged to its present size. It holds 8 of the 14 wintering colonies in the oyamel fir forests of central Mexico, an estimated 70% of the eastern population. Illegal logging is the main threat. The reserve was inscribed in 2008.
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