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The Frost in the Fir Canopy: Monitoring the Monarch Migration
Mateo checked the red digital readout of the weather telemetry unit for the third time, his breath pluming white against the pine-scented gloom. It was barely dawn at three thousand metres in the Sierra Chincua reserve, and the needle of the thermometer hovered at minus one degree Celsius. Beside him on the damp forest floor, his field assistant, Valeria, adjusted the tripod of an acoustic parabolic microphone, glancing anxiously upward. Suspended forty metres above their heads in the crowns of the oyamel firs hung enormous, pendulous clusters of monarch butterflies, packed so tightly together that the branches bent like weighted boughs of cedar. Had a sudden freezing squall struck during the night, the dormant insects would have crystallized and dropped like dead leaves.
Rarely had an autumn monitoring expedition begun with such acute apprehension.