I’ve lived in California all my life. And though I’ve lived in a variety of cities, all of them have been on the Central Coast. That means I don’t have a tolerance for major temperature shifts. For me, 72 degrees is optimal. So I totally understand why tens of thousands of monarch butterflies travel for hundreds of miles a day for days at 20 mph to bask in the relative winter warmth at Pismo Beach.
I recently trekked about 21 miles to the Pismo Beach Monarch Butterfly Grove to see this phenomenon I’ve never taken the time to see in all the years I’ve lived here. It wasn’t really a warm day, and I was starting to question these butterflies’ intelligence. I hugged my coat tightly around me and briskly walked passed the docents, through the grove, around a tree, and onto a park trail parallel to Highway 1.
Stupid butterflies come all this way just to hang out near the highway, I thought.
Then a nice couple on the trail told me I was way past the butterfly grove. I turned back and asked a docent what happened to the bugs. She pointed me to a telescope, through which I could see them everywhere, hanging in the trees. I looked at the eucalyptus without the lens and saw nothing. The docent laughed.
“That’s why we have the telescopes out,” she said. “Otherwise, people will walk by them and not even know they are there.”
The butterflies hang out in clusters, each wrapping a wing over the butterfly beneath it. They look exactly like hanging bunches of dead leaves—and that’s exactly the point. It’s camouflage. Since the butterflies have no known predators (they eat highly acidic milkweed, so monarchs don’t taste good), I can’t imagine why they feel a need to hide—other than that they’re on vacation and want to relax undisturbed.
And they do actually get a little more active when it’s warmer. On the day I visited, however, it was about 55 degrees as the fog rolled in.
“They don’t like to do much when it’s too cold, and they don’t like to fly when it’s too hot,” said docent Jim Stillwell. “They’re kinda like us. They like it around 70 degrees.”
Kinda? At that cold and dreary moment, I was contemplating clustering with the other vmembers of the group listening to the talk. I refrained and saved myself from an assault charge. Instead, I mustered up the energy to walk around the grove again and watch the occasional random butterfly break from the cluster to fly to another.
With nearly 21,000 monarchs expected to winter this year, the Pismo Beach Monarch Grove is one of the largest in the nation. The Pismo monarchs are also special because they live a long time for a butterfly. Most butterflies live six weeks. These live up to six months, thanks to a unique fat storing system. They arrive plump at the end of October, they slim down to mate around Valentine’s Day, and by March they’re outta here. They’ll never return. Their offspring, however, will, led by some genetic GPS that tells them Pismo Beach is the best place to winter.
Arts Editor Shelly Cone is always on the search for an endless summer. Send some sunshine to scone@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Dec 23-30, 2010.
