‘I gazed in amazement at the sight’ reads a photocopy of a 1976 National Geographic article on my lap. The words are bouncing on the page as the truck flies over steep mountain roads, but I can’t stop reading. ‘Butterflies —millions upon millions of monarch butterflies!’
The monarch’s wintering home —a mystery to scientists until the 1970s —was confirmed when Canadian zoologist Fred Urquhart and American entomologist Lincoln Brower were called to the northern Michoácan mountains in early 1976. Urquhart had spent 30 years studying their winter migration and the discovery made the cover of a few months later, with a