Annual Monarch Migration to Mexico: Video

If you’d like to take a special vacation this winter, consider heading south to Mexico. But not for the white sand beaches… for the butterflies. Millions of monarch butterflies have made their annual migration to the mountains of Mexico and you have until March to catch them in all of their glory.

Estimates put the number of monarchs at 4 million per acre in some of the butterfly reserves. Can you imagine?

“I have on many occasions seen Spaniards, Italians, Americans, Canadians, and Mexicans come into the butterfly colonies and literally weep,” said Lincoln Brower, a monarch expert at the University of Florida. “It’s such an overwhelming emotional experience to realize that you’re actually looking at these tens of millions of monarch butterflies that have come into this tiny, little area of Mexico.”

The eastern monarchs are the butterflies that winter in Mexico (the western monarchs stay in California) and they come to the exact same mountains every year. But the ones that arrive in the fall are not the ones that leave in the spring. After mating in Mexico (in March) and finding milkweed for their caterpillars, the females only live a few more weeks. It’s the next generation that migrates home. It can take up to four generations of butterflies to travel all the way back to New England, Canada, and the Great Lakes. In the fall, the robust autumn monarchs gain extra weight and live 12 times longer than the summer monarchs so they can survive the journey to their winter paradise.

Fascinating, don’t you think? What’s even more amazing is that we never see them traveling.

The butterflies gather in Texas and along the Gulf Coast, funneling into an invisible highway through the skies, heading south in waves to a place that their great-great-great grandparents left six months ago.

The butterfly reserves are a 4 hour drive from Mexico City. See link in the first paragraph for travel information.

Tourism is beneficial for the butterflies because it ensures they will remain protected. The endangered forests that the monarchs prefer were originally designated as agriculture cooperatives in the early 20th century, and did not become sanctuaries until the late 1980’s. Initially, the locals thought they were being robbed of their livelihoods, but are now becoming convinced that they can make a living from tourism instead of logging and deforestation.