Papalotzin Follows the Journey of the Monarchs

Mexican ultralight plane pilot Vico Gutiérrez is determined to conserve the monarch butterfly.

Gutiérrez is director of the Papalotzin project, an ambitious project in which he and his team have documented and filmed the flight of the monarchs from Canada to their overwintering site in Central Mexico with the help of an ultralight aircraft named Papalotzin. The name, which is from the Nahuatl (Aztec) language, combines Papalotl (butterfly) with tzin (royal), which means "royal butterfly" in English.The wings of the plane are decorated to resemble the wings of a monarch.

Gutiérrez was born in Mexico City and lives in Valle de Bravo near the winter home of the monarchs. He has been flying since the age of 13 and is a free flight and ultralight instructor. He is also a maker of films from his ultralight for commercials, documentaries and movies.

You can read a remarkable log of the flight of Papalotzin (English and Spanish) here. The log includes a galley of photographs.

The remarkable monarch weighs less than 1 gram and lives only around five weeks. Yet each fall a special generation of monarchs hatched from eggs laid in the Northeastern US and Eastern Canada begins a remarkable journey south. Over a three month period, they fly nearly 5,000 kilometers (3,100 miles) to several groves of trees in the forests of Central Mexico. There they spend some five months until winter is over. They then mate, and the females fly back north to Texas and other southern States, where they deposit eggs on the leaves of milkweed plants that have survived lawnmowers and pesticides.

The offspring of this generation continue the journey north until they, too, lay eggs and perish. After several generations, the monarchs reach as far as Eastern Canada. The monarchs that hatch in August are different from their parents. They are the generation that make the long flight south to Mexico, perhaps to spend the winter in the same grove of trees as their great-great-great grandparents the previous winter.

For a list of monarch links on the web, click on this Papalotzin site. Recursos en Español aqui.

Forrest M. Mims III