MOVING THE MONARCHY OFFLINE
when I decided to go see “the butterflies” in Michoacán with a couple of British strangers I was rooming with. By “the butterflies,” I mean the monarchs that migrate across North America from Canada to Mexico every year. They have a season, late winter,
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Misadventures Issue 5
and during this time tourists make pilgrimage to watch them fluttering around the ancient forests of the high country. Besides Butterflies Live!, an exotic butterfly showcase that takes place at the Lewis Ginter Botanical Gardens in Richmond, Virginia, I had never seen more
than three or four butterflies at a time. Butterflies Live! is, truthfully, awesome, but even so, it's a kind of butterfly petting zoo. What would it be like to see so many of them, out there, in the wild? I could only guess. Getting to the butterflies is not easy. We woke up at two in the morning to take the train and transferred twice to get to the station for the only bus to Angangueo
BUTTERFLIES IN ORBIT In 2009, Monarch caterpillars were sent to the International Space Station where Canadian Space Agency astronaut Robert Thirsk observed their complete metamorphosis. More than 173,400 students from all 50 states tuned in to watch the butterflies emerge from their chrysalides into microgravity.
