Butterflies

Ten hours in a car, two hours on horseback straight up, more than another hour straight up to see:

Was it worth it?  Absolutely!

Monarch butterflies migrate south every winter from somewhere in North America to the hills in Michoacan in Mexico, a few hours north of Mexico City.  The elevation in Guanajuato was nearly 7,000 feet, but the butterflies are over 10,000 feet so you go as far as you can on the road, and then ride a gentle horse as far as he can go.  Spoiler alert:  my very gentle horse tried to kick me off.  I'm getting kicked out a lot in Mexico.  I'm starting to take it personally.

After you ride as far as the horse can go, you then keep climbing on foot for another half hour.  The first day we went to the Rosario Reserve which has more butterflies - trees full of them.  Then on the second day we went to Sierra Chincua which was magical.  It had snowed on Sunday, but the butterflies didn't care.

In a few weeks, this generation of butterflies will fly back to Texas and lay their eggs there where the caterpillars can eat milkweed.  Milkweed is poisonous to many predators, so the butterflies survive by being hazardous to their predators.  Two or three generation after the butterflies that left Mexico, their great great grandchildren will somehow know to go back to the same hills in Michoacan.  Amazing!

In the pictures, it just looks like orange dots on tree branches, but I can assure you that every one of those dots is a butterfly dancing.

At Sierra Chincua, we stood absolutely silently in the absolutely silent forest.  No sounds at all - no forest sounds, no wind sounds.  And if you talked, one of the guides told you to be quiet.  We stood there and watched these silent creatures flit back and forth, leaving en masse from one tree to go to another.  

I wish I could show the movement of the butterflies as they flit about silently but they move too fast to catch their movement.  All you can do is stand there and appreciate them.