2005年NPR美国国家公共电台九月-Following the Monarchs in an Ultralight A

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One of the world's most amazing migration¹ is about to begin in earnest: 300 million monarch² butterflies spread across North America are about to converge³ on small forests in the mounts of Mexico. This year, the butterflies have an unusual company as NPR News John Nelson explains.

Francisco Gutierrez is a man whose life is ruled by two obsessions⁵. First, the monarch butterflies that fly out to Mexico every winter filling the trees in the forest near Gutierrez's home in the Mexican state of Mishawaka. When he was a kid, he used to stare at these trees for hours.

It's amazing. Sometimes, the branches of the trees broke(s), because of the weight. Or so many broke. Yeah, brokes that you can having(slip of tongue should be have) one tree, one million of monarchs⁶, imagine that.

Obsession⁴ No.2, not coincidentally is a 33-foot wide ultralight airplane with wings painted to look exactly like the wings of a giant monarch butterfly. Recently, Gutierrez and his motorized glider⁷ took off from a runway in Canada and turned to the south. And millions of monarchs converge on Mexico several weeks from now with Gutierrez's plane's gliding⁸ right behind them, filming everything. Eventually, he plans to produce a documentary that captures this migration from what you might call the monarch side point of view. Like the butterflies, he plans to make a lot of pit stops along the way however, recently he was in an airport in suburban⁹ area. Guttierrez spent that morning taking curious but terrified reporters off in his ultralight so that they could bounce around on the wind and catch the view from a thousand feet. On a flight like those / it's impossible not to marvel¹⁰ at the skills of an inch-wide insect that flies from Canada to Mexico.

5500 kilometers, imagine, if we compare the size of this thing with us, it's the same as we have to go to the moon and back, you know that. (The moon and back?) Yes, exactly the same distance.

Gutierrez has been warned not even veer¹¹ towards the protected airspace over the nation's capital. Not to be deterred¹², he towed his glider into the city and parked it on a baseball field. There he was met by Lincoln Brieward, a monarch expert at Sweetbuyer College in Virginia. Brieward called the glider trip a stunt¹³ that could help answer some important scientific questions. For instance:

No body has any real idea how far monarchs fly above the ground, are there thousands of them if you get up the airways¹⁴ and how high do they fly.

While Gutierrez taxied back and forth¹⁵ across the ball field, Brieward talked about the urgent need to draw attention to the threats to this migration. In the United States he says herbicide use is wiping out the weeds these insects need to eat. Meanwhile down in Mexico, illegal logging is rampant¹⁶, even in / protected forests. Brideward was in those forests last winter.

You can hear chainsaws in a distance, you can see piles of saw dust and , piles of chipped wood where they're, they are logging.

As Brideward talked an actual monarch butterfly flitted across the baseball field, the sign that the migration had begun. Gutierrez is now flown west out of suburban Maryland When he reaches Kansas he will veer to the left and head for Mexico.

John Nelson, NPR News Washington.

If you don't have time to make the trip yourself, you can find the photos of monarch butterflies and of the ultralight airplane Francisco Gutierrez is using to follow their migration might going to our website, NPR.org.