Episode 10 - Travelers: Stars, Monarchs, and Road Kill

MB = Michelle K Berry

EW = Emily Wakild

WW = Will Wright

EW: 0:00

Hello, my name is Michelle Berry. And I'm Emily Wakild, and we are your hosts for More Than: a Podcast. We're both historians, but before you push stop, let us explain what kind of history we study. We're both environmental historians.

MB: 0:18

Oh dear, Emily, I'm not sure that that makes us seem any more interesting. How about this instead? Basically, we tell stories about the past and try to make sure that our stories include animals, plants, bugs, dirt, weather, and the like. And we have created this podcast to convince you that history and even nature are more than you ever thought they were.

EW: 0:42

We also both live and work in the U.S. Mountain West. Think of the region connected by the Rocky Mountains, where we've spent most of our lives. We met in graduate school and we've been friends for almost 25 years. In this podcast, we bring you stories about different parts of the ecosystems that you can find throughout the U.S. Mountain West, from the Sonoran Desert, where Michelle lives, to the Northern Rockies, where I live.

MB: 1:06

These stories have fascinating historical components and connections to contemporary issues. In addition to hopefully showing you how much more history can be, we also call the podcast More Than, because unlike typical history, we're going to put the morethanhuman at the center of each episode.

EW: 1:25

We are convinced that once you hear about the power the more than human has had in the past, you will love history and nature even more than you do now.

MB: 1:38

Now, each of the topics we have chosen has many histories, so we're only picking a few to focus on in each episode. But for many of the episodes, we'll also have a special guest or two to tell us even more about that particular topic. Join us as we explore more than you could ever expect to in a podcast about the environment and history.

I cannot believe we are at our penultimate episode, Em. Can you believe this?

EW: So exciting.

MB: I know. First of all, just because we're ready to have something actually completed in our professional lives. Also because it's just been so much fun and what a journey we have been on. I mean, we... have in the last, what, nine episodes or however many episodes. We've traveled from Idaho to Arizona with all kinds of stops in between. We've leapt from deep in the dirt to the tops of the Ponderosa Pines and we've traversed time from, I think, I mean, we've, I think we've done stuff as early as the Pleistocene to as late as, well, this morning. And we thought then what better place to begin to close this particular run of this podcast than with an exploration of the importance of movement to the region's ecology and culture. So we aren't going to center any one more than human being or entity in this episode necessarily. We've got a couple of examples that we're going to try to weave together, but we are going to highlight many different kinds of migrations and we are excited for you to join us for this episode, Travelers: Stars, Monarchs, and Roadkill.

EW: Yes, I love that. And movements that matter and that are material and the ways that they move and what they tell us about history and people and the landscape, I think is really revealing. We have had quite a journey and what better time to consider the act of journeying itself, right? And such a good reminder that we don't journey as humans alone. We're interwoven with all of these wonderful stories.

MB: 3:49

Yes, I love it. And if we have a historical mindset, we might know better what the path ahead may present, right? Or we have a sense of maybe where we've been, which I think can be empowering in such important ways. And I remember speaking of knowing where we're going. I remember when we were first planning this episode that we wanted to focus solely on roads, right? And then we were going to do a separate whole episode on dark skies. But then we began to think about how those two things connect via movement and via travelers. And I'm not much of an astronomer, but I remember as a kid, whitewater rafting all over the rivers of the Southwest. And the stars were so profound to me because when you're on the river, especially in Canyon country, you know, the Milky Way is so beautiful. It feels very low because it's so bright and so accessible, I guess, is maybe the best word. And we would lay under the Milky Way and just get enveloped by its multitudes. And at some point, I began to learn the basic constellations and began to understand how you could navigate your journey by knowing the stars. I mean, I would not... I would not trust me in that. If we ever go on a backpacking trip or something, don't rely on me to navigate us at night. But I get the concept, right? Because I remember my dad's, one of my dad's really good friends who was constantly talking about all the whatever, the North Star and all the ways in which you can use them to know where you're going. I also remember him saying that all the stars or most of the stars that we were seeing were history, that they had lived in the past and we were just seeing them the first time because of the distance and the time it takes for light to travel. And that blew my mind. And I still am enamored with a starry night that I try hard to witness, to go out, to look at, to commune in some way with. And it helps us get off the glare of our phone and really just allow ourselves to be immersed in darkness. Um, and in Arizona, we are lucky because we have a lot of dark skies, even though we are increasingly, uh, certified urbanized. Uh, we do have a lot of dark skies and we actually have the world's first international dark sky city, which is Flagstaff. And that designation doesn't really come until the early two thousands. But part of the reasons it was one of the first is because it had had a progressive, uh, outdoor light policy that sort of limited the kinds of outdoor light, how much you people could have. And they passed that in 19, Talk about prescient. Talk about forward thinking. They're passing this ordinance just as the Sunbelt was beginning its ascent into becoming the fastest growing region in the country. And that's just cool. And of course, one of my favorite breweries is also in Flagstaff, Dark Sky Brewery. So there you go.

EW: 6:38

Amazing. Amazing. Well, I think the ways that you've talked about sort of the power of the night sky because of the humility that the stars bring us is spot on. I've experienced, I've watched my kids experience that as they see stars and start to identify the bear and the Big Dipper and some of those constellations and talk about that history. And I think this pivot that you're talking about kind of policy-wise is also fascinating because For so much of humankind, darkness was equated with fear, right? And you bring light to something by using fire and by, you know, sort of the enlightenment is bringing things out of the dark. But when we start to see darkness itself as this resource, it's a sort of different history that can be told. undevelopment or underdevelopment or darkness as actually a resource and something to be cared about and something to be protected. And this started out initially as light pollution, right? And it was a description of cities polluting the darkness, but it pivoted through largely citizen and scientist-driven organizations, right? This was not a federal mandate to sort of regulate this resource, but it was driven by Flagstaff for example, here in Idaho, a dear friend of mine, Monica Hubbard, ran a policy class and the students put together a proposal that resulted in the first dark sky reserve. So there's cities, there's parks, and there's reserves. And the center of Idaho is one of the most largest contiguous wilderness areas in the lower 48, but it's also dark, right? There are not big cities in its And so they proposed the Central Idaho Dark Sky Reserve, and it now helps regulate the way lights are used in the small towns that are actually there. It's the largest of its kind. But what's fascinating to me is to think about instead of the negative framing of light as pollution is the positive framing of celebrating the darkness and celebrating the dark sky and celebrating really what it is that the stars and the moon give to us. And when we kind of explore the ways that the dark sky is wild, like you gave testimony to, I think our understanding of energy and of more than human energy really shifts because there's a timescale to that as well.

MB: 9:26

Yeah, I love that. You make me think about all of the long history of humans trying to harness light and try to bring light into the darkness. And I, so I just, we don't want to go there because we're talking about darkness, but there's a terrific book called American Lucifers that you should read listeners. If you're interested, my nephew got it for Christmas and I don't know if he's reading it yet, but I have told him he has to read this book because it's really about the labor that goes into making artificial light from way back in the 1500s, all the way into the like early 20th century. Anyway, it's a super cool book. But dark skies have, Bringing light to things isn't always necessary to know where you're going. Dark skies have historically been important for human navigation. We know that, right, especially around ships and trans-oceanic travel, etc. But they're also crucial for critters on the move, dark skies. Migrating birds need dark skies. We don't have sea turtles in the Mountain West, but sea turtles and various kinds of insects can get confused if there's too much artificial light in the night when they're trying to seek the place is that they're trying to go. And the social movement, I think when we think about movement and travel, we can think about societies moving and traveling politically and socially. And that social movement that you're talking about, citizen-based, almost populist in a way, to protect the night is such a niche thing that I bet so many of our listeners don't even know it exists. But I suspect that if we really stop and think about it, we can understand how and why night is is important for all kinds of reasons, not the least of which is that it allows us to literally see the universe. And that is really important for our own understanding of ourselves.

EW: 11:16

Well, and just profound, right? And there are so many ways that the darkness does open up paths, right? Paths that other animals take, that nocturnal animals are able to see, animals with eyes that work differently from ours, that are adapted to light in ways that we are And also to sort of see the world whole. And there is this amazing history book that came out of the reckoning that happened post 1992, right? The 500 year anniversary of Columbus and the ways that that made the world whole, right? And sort of completed the circuits of especially European travelers, but really changed the way animals and plants exchanged across the world. And there is this whole series of books that come out of that in the early 1990s. And there's one by a colonial Latin American historian, Patricia Seed, that's called Ceremonies of Possession. And I promise this relates to light. This is not just a tangent, but this book. I don't believe you. Everything comes back to history, especially Latin American history. Let me prove it to you.

MB: 12:28

Never mind that this is a podcast about the Mountain West.

EW: Yes. That's Latin American, too. It is.

MB: 12:35

It is. I know how you are. And cattle.

EW: Exactly. And cows in there, too.

Anyway, what Patricia Seed is doing here is trying to look specifically at the ceremonies that particular colonial people enacted when they arrived in a new land. And so she looks at the English and how the English arrived in New England and they built houses. And it was not until there was a house and a fence that proper claim was laid to that landscape. And that's how they articulated their version of property. And the French, being the French, of course, threw a parade. They marched. march through town and they had costumes and they sang, very French of them, to enact that ceremony. And these rituals, she tells us, were as important in illiterate societies as anything that they wrote down. And so the Spanish, they delivered a speech, the requirimiento or the requirement, which told the people who listened to the speech and probably didn't understand a word of it that they were then subject to the king, right? But the Portuguese in In their ceremony, ritual, and way of enacting their power on a new land, they used the sky and the stars. And they were a profoundly navigatory people who used ships, and the Portuguese Empire spanned the world, right, from southern Africa through Brazil and the parts of Asia, and the Portuguese articulated with their instruments and tools, basically, on the stars, what the stars mapped out the new place to be. And that was the ritual that made them understand how that place lined up in the universe. And then they could claim it to be theirs, right? And I've always appreciated this book because she asked this really deep question about what it means to possess something. Not necessarily property, right? Not necessarily ownership. But what it means to sort of have a ceremony of possession. And the rituals and the sort of spiritual connection mediated through these ceremonies indicates a shared culture. And I think... If we were to answer this for the 20th century in the United States, the act of possession that has claimed the Mountain West would undoubtedly be road building. And it would be laying down a network of permanent spaces for people to travel upon.

MB: 15:14

Yeah, I love that. You know, it's interesting because as you were talking here, I'm bringing it back to the Mountain West.

The Homestead Act that's passed during Lincoln's administration, the first administration, he didn't have much of a second one, suggested that the way that you could claim ownership was to make, quote unquote, an improvement, right? And then you got the land for a discounted rate. And then, of course, as the Homestead Act is sort of taking shape and mostly white Anglos are moving west from the East into the Mountain West it brings with them they bring with them a need for trails so of course we can think about the Oregon Trail... it used to be that I would, back in the day I had students who loved the video game the Oregon trail I think that's what it was called. Now my students don't have any idea what the hell that is but um it's so strange uh it's good though because i didn't know what it was back in the day and now I still don't really know and so now I'm just you know, finally on the same page as my students, which is nice for once.

EW: You're kind of describing happened also with colonization and the Portuguese.

MB: And what's fascinating is I think sometimes when we think about roads in particular and the railroad We think of that technology as being inorganic, as being not natural, as being technology. There's one of those binaries that we've kind of hinted at as we've moved through our podcast that I think still sticks in most people's minds, that nature is different from technology, that technology is a thing apart from nature. I don't know that that's true. And I think we can make really good arguments for the ways in which nature creates or is at least part of all of the different kinds of technologies. And this is true of roads as well. Sometimes the roads were quite literally just natural, right? They were just dirt paths where trees had been cleared and what have you. But sometimes there was significant engineering that had to go into the creation of the roads, either because of their route and with the railroads because of the actual technology of rail travel itself. Even so, even as much as that seems technological and quote unquote unnatural, historians like Mark Fiege ask us to think about where to look at where the nature is in these things. And he's got an amazing book called The Republic of Nature that everyone should check out. It's very long and each chapter is very long, but it's really wonderful stuff. I want to read something real quick. "As metallic and mechanical as the railroad was, the movement of a locomotive required the miracle of organic life. The timbers and boards that composed bridges and poles, the cross ties that held rails, and the chunks of wood in the Jupiter, that's a locomotive on the Union Pacific, the Jupiter's firebox. How many trees, how many forests succumb to the axe? It's easy to miss a remarkable paradox that a technology epitomized by iron and steel relied so heavily on plants." And I love that. And so I think that as we think about roads as networking, as connectors, as disruptors, we can also think about them as nature.

EW: 18:55

Oh, absolutely. I love that, Michelle. And I think it's so interesting how we think of that opposition instead of seeing the way those roads maybe create a scar or those rails create a scar on the land, but they are made of the land still, and they become adopted and used by the land. So it's no surprise that the biggest... boom in vegetation in a dry land is right along the road, right? Because that impermeable surface pushes the water to the edges. And right on the edge of the road is the most advantageous place for a plant or weed to grow, right? Because they get that extra. And so it seems counterintuitive that the road is blocking that life and also enabling it. Right. And enabling it in a really different way. And so I think that that that juxtaposition really opens up sort of an interesting perspective in thinking about how roads and railroads work. And the other piece that has always struck me as really interesting is that animals take roads. Like it's easier for them to take the trail or to take the road. And I often set up a game camera. We've talked about that before up at our cabin. And the interesting thing to me is we don't catch them in the yard. We catch them on the road, especially when there's a lot of snow on the ground because the road is plowed and it's easier for an animal to take the path of least resistance. And so often that is a road.

MB: 20:31

I think that's so cool. And I think sometimes we think about and I think there's really good evidence for this, that historically roads, especially the kind of roads in the habitat of the wildlife, so especially we can think about the United States Forest Service and forest roads, can be detrimental to ecologies. They can hurt habitat. And that's true. But I think also what you're saying is also really true. And so this is a moment of a yes and. Because no matter how we interpret them, roads in the Mountain West have been ecology creators, and they've been generators of millions of histories. I think that these roads that we're describing, the railroads, eventually the dirt roads through forests, just the gravel road that takes you to the cabin in McCall, these invite us to think about the directions that beings have moved in the Mountain West. Animal beings, human beings, all kinds of beings. And right now, our dominant political narrative, I think, seems to suggest that the movement of people into our region has been east to west, and certainly that there's truth to both of these, and south to north. But I think we sometimes overlook the fact that folks have always moved also west to east. Chinese building that railroad we were just talking about in the 19th century is an example. Inland from the coast, especially during World War II, as the military establishes various kinds of bases in the Mountain West and the Southwest. And then again, sort of post-COVID, right? We're thinking about people who got tired of living in the big cities and they're trying to find new ways to live their lives and they can do so, "remotely." I think that's kind of interesting to think about the places they moved to to do that work. So sometimes we're also seeing, while maybe the early 20th century, we saw rural to urban movement, now we're starting to see urban to rural movement, Kalispell, Montana, a really cool place where one of our good friends is from, is in so many areas there in Idaho, are seeing such profound growth as folks choose to leave the metropolises and move to seek new kinds of lifestyles.

EW: 22:30

Oh, it's the number one issue on any public policy survey in Idaho right now, right, is growth. And the part that's fascinating to me is that it's not new. And of course, as the historian, I think about that. But in the 1990s, when I was in high school here, the issue of people from California moving up to Idaho and changing our ways and building architecture that didn't fit in was very much similar then, but it goes back even further. And I have this wonderful colleague who likes to point out that Idaho was probably the last place that European settlement became permanent, right? Because people went through on the Oregon Trail, but they kept going. And they didn't sort of settle and make homes here. And then they came back, right? And so people moved westward, like you were saying, but then they moved eastward afterwards. And some of those original immigrants came from California, right? The first woman born in Idaho of European or Anglo parents came from California. They were 49ers that moved out to California to be working the gold mines. And then they moved up after that. And so that I think dynamism is really interesting. The trails, the Oregon trails continue to bring people. But the part that's really fascinating, I think, is how some of those human trails and then roads and railroads followed the rivers. Thank you. And how much so many of our roads and structures actually have a natural cadence to them that goes through the low points in a mountain range or cuts alongside the river because that water went where there was the path of the least resistance. And so the easiest place to put a road is right alongside it. And so certainly Idaho's single road, there's only one that goes from north to south, Highway 55. It travels the Payette River the whole way up. And even highways, right? So even the interstate highway system, which itself is an amazing strategic artifact of history, right? And accomplishment by the Eisenhower administration of what can be done to put strategic resources into play to connect really disparate states in the country. I-84, the interstate that goes from Oregon into Idaho, goes along the Columbia River. And there is nothing like coming into the gorge and seeing that river and the road, the enormous federal highway alongside of it, and thinking of those as twins, right? As these twin routes into and towards the Pacific.

MB: 25:15

You know, it's... We could go on and on about the kind of the legislative, the human centered part of road building, both the labor that goes into it, but then also the legislative kind of political funding stuff that happens. And I think we as a populace tend to overlook the role that government, and specifically the federal government, played in creating the roads that we now travel that allows so much of our connectivity. I think we forget who built those darn roads. I think we'll often think about the railroad itself as being, yes, constructed by private companies, but on government land and with a lot of payment from the United States federal government. So the federal government has enabled so much of our movement. But within the force themselves, there's sort of this huge, and this goes back a little bit to another episode when we talked about fire and fire suppression efforts but in the 20s and 30s the 20s for slightly different reasons and then the 30s there's kind of a road building boom in the national forest. It's it's especially in the northern rockies but it even stretches down into Arizona and New Mexico certainly and so a lot of that sort of occurs between the 1920s and World War II. And it's stimulated by this massive federal effort to make sure that, one, there were roads that were made the forest accessible to fight fire should they break out, but two, and also to access timber and mineral resources. But then also this kind of new automobile craze that had taken over America by the 1920s. And those who could afford it could maybe get in a car and go on what we all now know very commonly, right? A road trip. We may not go on them. Some people hate road trips. Some people hate driving, et cetera. Some people can't afford it. But everybody's heard of a road trip at this point. But in the 1920s, this was new. And the U.S. federal government thought this is going to be a really important economic boon for the growth of some of these quote unquote remote places in order to get folks to be able to go experience the wilderness, to get out of doors, to enjoy the recreational opportunities that these places afford. But they had to have a way to get there. And increasingly, it would be cool if they could get their cars there. That was sort of the thinking. So the Federal Highway Act of 1921 gives a separate line item to the Forest Service budget. Now this all sounds very boring, but it's really important. It allows road construction to expand in the 20s. And now we have so many roads throughout national forests. Chinle, the dog, our dog, Chinle. and I don't know if you do this with Cow, but Chinle has her roads. She had her roads. She's now passed, but she had her roads that we named Chinle's roads because they were her favorite things to walk on. They were, you know, less prickly. They were, she could kind of run and see things and they wasn't all overgrown by grass. She loves a forest service road. Now my nephew's dog, Rosie, has gotten to claim a couple of roads of her own in Northern New Mexico and I think also in Colorado. But this is important because these roads allow this, access. And that comes with great joy for those who are able to do it. It also comes with a lot of political controversy, especially when indigenous peoples, their right to these lands and to hunting and to fishing and to access come into play. But nonetheless, none of that would be happening if it weren't for the roads. And so there's that more than human creating historical stories.

EW: 28:45

Oh, and I think that what you've just juxtaposed there, Michelle, is that roads bring people places. So they take you out, right? You and your dogs and you're on the road trip in an adventure. And then they are also put into place to extract things, right? To bring those logs and to pull the lumber out of a specific place and put it in. And that exchange back and forth on a road, I think is such an important piece of And that's not necessarily migration in a pattern that has a seasonal cadence to it, right? But it's movement that takes place because of that infrastructure that is expensive and that can only be supported by a human institution that isn't seeking protection. profit alone, right? It is seeking this larger piece of infrastructure. And so what's neat to me about the 20th century road movement is, as you described, in the 1920s and the 1930s, there's this tremendous boom that really sort of doesn't let up, right? Let's build roads everywhere. Let's make everything accessible. Let's facilitate the automobile and driving. And so all of this culture grows up around that, and it really sort of travels everywhere. But then in the 1980s, as so often we see the 1930s and the 1980s are these bookends of economic pressures that change culture. In the 1980s, you start to get a backlash to celebrate places that don't have roads. And so this is not unlike dark skies as being a resource. Roadless areas become articulated as spaces of value. And in kind of hiker-backpacker worlds. There's this sort of subtle contest of where can you go to be the furthest from a road in the lower 48, right? Is that, you know, somewhere in western Wyoming, or is that in central Idaho, or is that on the Navajo Reservation? You know, sort of where is that spot that's the most distant from a road? And then you also have this kind of compromise legislation that's reacting to the Oh, yeah.

MB: 31:53

Yeah. And it's funny when we were planning this episode, I didn't even think about roadlessness. I was because I was thinking about roads. So I love that you brought that up because it really is. And it's also it's also an example of how the more than human creates historic developments that kind of then really get going. Right. They pick up steam. They become very popular. And then they are very presence sort of makes people want to reconsider roads. What's happening? I think roads are one of the best examples of that, of a technology that got let out the barn, as we say. And then as folks began to really think through it, thought, oh, maybe too much of a good thing is too much. So I think that's a really important concept that you're bringing up there. I want to transition us just because of time. Our 30-minute podcast, Em, turned into an absolute no questions asked, hour-long podcast. Every episode, it's hysterical. (laughter) And we should have known that 20 to 30 minutes was not possible. If you've ever sat and had a beer with us, you would know that that was not going to happen. We could dream, but it didn't happen. So here we are. But I want to transition us because we've got a really cool guest coming up to think about the more-than-human animals that move and migration of different kinds of species other than humans and their built roads. I want to think about how migration, we think of it as a process, as a movement from one place to another place. But I think it's also a kind of knowledge. And I think that's true, not just of wildlife and more than humans who move, but also humans. And this connects back to our interloper episode where we talk about, you know, you can designate a meadow as a space for an antelope to graze and on the other side of the fence, a space for not antelope to graze. The antelope are like, they look at the fence and they jump in and they go, screw you. So interlopers and migratory animals are such a fascinating thing to think about when we think about travelers and when we think about movements that matter. And I think it's fascinating to think about how what it is that the antelope knows that suggests that it should jump over that fence and get to the other side, that the mule deer know exactly where to go. All of these animals that move understand the resources that exist in the place where they are and that exist where they are going to go. And they understand seasons. They know when the seasons are changing. And so there's this really phenomenal knowledge that exists in these migratory species that I think often goes unnoticed. Is that a word? Not considered. I mean, I think it's true, too, for humans. And we don't think about that a lot. We just sort of, I think, often demonize, especially, you know, folks who are moving from south of the border into the United States and the reasons for their doing so. It's been so misconstrued in so much of our political discourse. I've assigned a book by Jennifer Denetdale from my US West class this semester, and she's Navajo. And she talks about how human communities moving can, of course, represent tragedy. She talks about the long walk of the Navajo in 1864 when they were displaced from their homelands. But she also kind of readjusts that and talks about the ways in which movement represents knowledge, represents dynamisms, represents initiative and inspiration. And for so many migrating animals, humans included, there's very often a return home.

EW: 35:23

Oh, I think that's so beautiful. Within Idaho who came from South Texas and returned north to follow the onion or the potato harvest or the apples and then returned to southern Texas. And there's a brilliant book of forests and fields, it's called, about that Texas to Idaho and Washington and Oregon migration that is made largely of Spanish-speaking Mexican descent people. But many of them have been five or six generations following this pattern. And that that that has not just influenced the places they've came, but the receiving communities also become home in really important ways. And I think it's worthwhile to think about the different ways that animals shape their communities in similar ways. Right. And so. And thinking about how the crossing of a bridge or the roads that exist enable and impede some of those migrations. I've always thought it's so silly to see like elk crossing signs, right? Remember as a kid being like, wait, are they here? Where are they coming? I want to stop and watch, right? It seems so futile, but... As the 1970s, wildlife bridges were accommodating these animals because there was a human cost to hitting a deer and having a car accident, but there was also a material cost for animals, right? And roadkill adds up tremendously. And so the initial wildlife corridors were under roads, but no prey animal wants to go through a tunnel and go under like that didn't work at all. And so sort of more ingenious sort of nature-based solutions have produced Right.

MB: 37:53

Well, I think when we were planning the episode, we thought briefly about going off on roadkill and taxidermy. I don't know. We had all kinds of crazy ideas for this episode, and then we're like, it's going to be 17 hours long. But it is... Oh, now I've just lost my train of thought. Totally. Oh, roads really do facilitate transport, but they also, as you're saying, can be a real barrier for wildlife. And roadkill... is, I mean, the numbers of vertebrates that are killed on highways or on roads in the mountains is staggering, right? I mean, it's like in the hundreds of millions total in the United States, I think it's like a billion a year or something or a million every day. So I don't know, something, it's crazy. I also think it's interesting that those numbers that we look at do not include insects because I'm telling you, man, when I am driving on my way to New Mexico, there is this section of I-10 in between Lordsburg and Deming. And I, every, it doesn't matter the time of year. It doesn't matter. I don't think it matters the time of day. And I just hit this cloud of, I don't know what, because they're really, they're really not identifiable by the time I've flown through them. But man, there's just the, you know, so I kill, I swear I must kill 20,000 bugs every single time I drive on that particular stretch of I-10. And so it's, I don't think there's anything we can do to help the insects not congregate on the interstate. I think that's just going to keep happening. But these wildlife bridges, which I think actually the idea maybe came originally from Europe. But we have a lot in the region that are becoming wildly successful. And we've got them in Colorado over I-70. We've got the first one here in the Sonora Desert is right north of Tucson. That seems to really be really effective. It's fascinating to watch the before and after pictures. I'll try to put these on the website about... the ways in which we vegetate the bridges to make them more welcoming for the travelers and for all the animals that will use them. And interestingly, it's better if people are nowhere near the bridges. They become less navigable for wildlife, less preferable if there's a lot of people trying to watch wildlife as they're crossing or humans using it for any number of reasons. And so it's kind of interesting just to think about the like you just said, the innovation of these wildlife bridges across these enormously huge roads and also the ways in which animals adjust and also learn new ways of completing their movements.

EW: 40:16

Well, and did you know that there's actually a metric for measuring the density of bugs on a windshield? Science has sort of quantified that as an indicator of the health of that insect population. I wish I was kidding.

MB: How do you know this stuff, Emily? I don't understand. What in the world?

EW: Okay, well, I have to tell you my favorite joke. What's the last thing to go through a bug's mind when it hits your windshield? I don't know. His butt. (laughter)

MB: 40:53

Oh, that's awful.

EW: 40:55

Sorry. I live with small children. These things are...Potty humor is part of the game.

MB: I was going to say, I bet you heard that from Ray. I mean, you'd think that we would tell... You know, dad jokes are supposed to go from the parent to the child. But I think in a lot of times, those are coming from the child to you, is what I'm thinking.

EW: That is right. In all seriousness, one of the most interesting insects of our ecosystem is the monarch butterfly. And it has these amazing rituals. It has a symbolic value in Mexico, the US and Canada. And it travels several thousand miles over generations to move across these ecosystems that give it sustenance. And so we're going to talk here in a minute with Will Wright, who is an expert on monarchs and an of other migrating species and think about how it is that this amazing insect can teach us and help us understand them more than human.

MB: 42:01

I love that. And I think the monarch was one of our spirit animals in inspiring this podcast because we thought, look at all the look at all the history that this butterfly has created and all on its own, right? Just because it exists and is really cool. So can't wait to talk to Will. So here we go. Let's hear from Will.

SPEAKER_01: 42:21

Thank you so much. tell us a little bit about what it is about monarchs that capture the hearts and imagination and really just sort of cultural energy of so many different humans and communities? There isn't really another insect that sort of has that cultural capital, right?

WW: 43:10

Yeah. Well, I can think of at least two reasons to help explain why monarchs are so popular. One obvious and one less obvious. The obvious explanation is that monarchs are easy to spot and identify. This has due to their size. So they aren't the largest butterfly. That goes to the Queen Alexandra birdwing butterfly that's like 12-inch wingspan. But they do have a much larger wingspan than many other butterfly and moth species. Typically, average is like two inches in wingspan and the monarch butterfly is double that it's four so it's just large the other has to do with its coloration um in that most butterflies and moths use camouflage to kind of avoid or deter predators like birds bats i can think of like the pearly leaf wing has the brown and orange and gray coloration that looks like a dead leaf Whereas monarchs don't try to hide at all. They're the bright orange coloration, which is really a warning sign to birds to just say, hey, I'm poisonous. And this poison actually... comes from the host plant that they eat when they're caterpillars, a family of milkweeds called Asclepias. And many of these have this chemical cut substance called cardenolides. This is referred to as cardiac glycokides because of similar properties found in medications for treating regular heart rhythms. But so when monarch caterpillars sort of munch on milkweeds, they actually internalize this poison and then use it as a defense mechanism against birds. And there's some really cool research that was done in the 1950s by Jane Van Zantbrouwer and Lincoln Brouwer. They were actually interested on why viceroy butterflies look very similar. And they thought, well, maybe this is a mimicry thing going on. And so they captured some scrub jays starting in the 1950s. And they started releasing the monarch and the viceroy at the same time. And of course, when they ate the monarch, they sort of spit it out. It was sort of distasteful. And so then they got that sort of down and then they started after they did this then they would release two viceroys at the same time and they found that basically the scrub jays avoided monarchs or the butterflies on site and so this proved experimentally that the viceroy butterflies were mimicking monarchs because of the poison and then so they take this experiment one step further Lincoln Brower is sort of raising monarch caterpillars and he tastes some milkweed and he sort of has this like vomiting reaction to it and so he's saying you know what's going on here so he decides he's going to raise monarch caterpillars on cabbage most end up dying but after a few generations they actually rear some of these cat monarch caterpillars to adulthood on cabbage and so they do a similar experiment where they have these captured blue jays and They release mealworms as a first as sort of a negative control. And every time the blue jays eat the mealworms, this sort of tasty snack. Then they start releasing the cabbage reared monarchs and the scrub jays are like, oh, this is another sort of tasty morsel. So they start doing this and get the blue jays accustomed to eating monarchs. Then they release the ones that are a fed milkweed, this species named Eclepsius curavassica. And they get the response they're looking for, that vomiting basically occurs every time. And there's sort of this famous image. It's called the Brower's Barfing Blue Jay. And it's sort of this blue jay that's like, you know, that they capture. And so that kind of gets to size, colorization. They're easy to spot and identify.

MB: 47:26

And we should have named the episode. What was it? The barfing...barfing....Blue Jay. (laughter)

WW: 47:42

That's the obvious explanation because of size and coloration. They're just easy to find the, the less obvious explanation is, is that monarchs have been the subject of citizen science efforts for the last 75 years. Starting in the 1940s, there was this husband and wife team of Canadian researchers at the University of Toronto named Fred and Nora Urquhart. And they basically wanted to know where the monarchs that they saw every summer in Ontario, Canada went during the wintertime. And so like bird banting, they created this tagging system where you'd have this posted size stamp that would be folded over the forewing of the butterfly. And it had the little message return to Museum of Toronto, Ontario on it, because that's where Fred Urquhart worked. And each held like this unique serial number that's established sort of who did the tagging, when it was done, and then when a recovery was made so that they could make this kind of point A to point B line on the map. And when they started doing this in the 1950s, they saw that there was kind of these ones going from Toronto to places like upstate New York. But they really thought, well, if we're going to find a larger pattern of movement, we need more people to help us in this endeavor. And so Nora Urquhart in the 1950s started writing books. magazines and newspaper articles, basically sort of recruiting, hey, we need lay volunteers to help us do the tagging and report tag recoveries. And so by the 1960s, they had over a thousand of these lay volunteers. They called them research associates, which we today would sort of dub sort of citizen science from all the Canadian territories and I think like 39 U.S. states. So they had quite this network of participants. And they would sort of tag butterflies and report tiger cutters. They published a publication as part of this insect migration association. That's a group that they called themselves. And they sort of had these dedicated followers. One person I'm thinking of is Don Davis, who started in the 1960s when he was a teenager and continued to do it for 30 years. And he sort of had this comment that, you know, you didn't have to be a rocket scientist or a PhD to make this scientific contribution. And sort of people felt good about that. And so I think these kind of tactile, intimate experiences that people had sort of tagging and rearing butterflies gave people reason to bond with monarchs in the way that they don't bond with other species of insect. In some ways, sort of turned it into an iconic, charismatic species. So the Insect Migration Association no longer exists. It disbanded, but in the 1990s, an organization called Monarch Watch at the University of Kansas basically took over that tagging program. So it continues to this day. School children, you know, all across the U.S. and Canada and Mexico participate in tagging butterflies. I mean, it's why the monarch butterfly is the state insect of Idaho, right? Fourth graders at Boise's Cole Elementary basically lobbied the state legislature to have it as a sort of statewide symbol. And so, yeah, this kind of citizen science, I think, is another reason why monarchs are just so popular compared to sort of other insects.

EW: 51:19

And those are such great examples of like the symbolism, but also the charisma of the particular makeup of the insect and the ability of just sort of regular people to observe the things that they see. Certainly when I taught sixth grade in Texas, we hatched monarchs in our classroom, you better believe it, right? And then watch them in the migration, but they're symbolic of NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement. They're symbolic of all kinds of different things. So yeah, what an interesting story.

MB: 51:50

And I've tried really hard to grow milkweed, and it's impossible, just so you know. I've tried to be that backyard monarch habitat thing. Not possible.

WW: 52:03

That's great.

MB: 52:05

So it's great. One of the things that I did whilst... you know, sort of researching for this episode and for our conversation was read some more stuff kind of about how the biology of monarchs. And I had no idea that they don't, that a single monarch doesn't make the trip back. Right. So they're, they're not necessarily migrating based on memory or kind of a, uh, um, time. Uh, what am I gosh, see, that's late in the afternoon and I've lost my mind. Um, you know, sort of a, a, a time honored habit. And they have this multi-generational cycle that spans three nations, but we've got these individuals that go, that migrate and don't go back. Can you just tell us about how the migration story kind of upends what we know about borders and life cycles and even how different kinds of animals move and migrate?

WW: 53:01

Yeah, they're, they're, like you mentioned, Michelle, the monarch migration is sort of unique because of the compression of life cycles for the monarch butterfly. I mean, you think about like other sort of epic migrations of animals, right? Like the porcupine caribou herd, right? They go over this land-based migration of 2000 miles spanning the Yukon territory and Alaska. But because caribou live four to 12 years, right? This is something that they're teaching. They're sort of, generations. Or if you think about the humpback whale migrations from Baja, California to Bering Sea, again, it's an epic migration, 3,000 miles plus. But again, humpback whales live 80 to 90 years. So this is something that they can teach their young how to do. And so the unique thing about the monarch migration is it happens over four generations. The typical monarch life cycle is only like four to six weeks long. And so monarchs actually start from central Mexico every spring and sort of move northward, laying eggs on basically milkweed as it blooms. And they keep sort of pushing northward. So three to four generations move northward. Maybe the first is in Texas. The second generation is in Kansas. The third's in Manitoba. The fourth's in Ontario. And then it's that Final generation, so these are the great-grandchildren, right, that have never been to the place before. They go into what ecologists call a reproductive diapause. They basically stop laying eggs. And this super generation, or sometimes it's referred to the Methuselah generation because of the kind of biblical prophet that lived like 900 years. That final generation lives actually eight months and they are the ones that make the entire migration back to central Mexico and live eight months out of the year. And so this is a place that they haven't been taught to go because they don't live that long. And like you said, spans, it's, you know, 2,800 miles more or less for the long one. So this is a very long migration to Mexico. So it's also sort of unique for that. It's also unique in that it sort of spreads out over 2 million square miles, right, over North America, you know, I think from kind of Minnesota to Maine, Mississippi to Manitoba, and then it sort of funnels down and really over winters in Mexico on kind of mere acres at a biosphere reserve. And so that's also sort of something that you see very unique. In the United States, Monarch Watch establishes what they call the Milkweed Waystation Program, while Michelle was maybe sort of spurred on to plant milkweed or other pollinators. And they basically, they have this huge network of taggers, and they basically say, starting in 2014, before Chip Taylor receives this letter from a farmer in Lane, Nebraska, basically saying, hey, I used to see monarchs all the time, and I don't see very many monarchs now. And this sort of backed up with what Chip Taylor and others are seeing empirically, particularly in the sort of US Midwest. And so they said, well, it's probably due to all the agricultural herbicides we're using on our farms. And so to counteract that, let's think about basically creating our taggers to become gardeners and plant milkweed everywhere and anywhere we can. And in some ways, it's amazing to think about in the first year, they get 3,000 people to establish a monarch way station, a pollinator garden. And They're now up to like 300,000 Monarch way stations. It's sort of amazing to think about. And each year, they average about another 3,000 that are added to that. And so that's another thing of these kind of site-specific protections. And then I would say finally, if there is kind of a final era, I would say it's been an era of collaboration. The Monarch has different habitat needs and environmental concerns in each different country. And so it's kind of this string of pearls. If you sort of snap the string, like all the pearls sort of scatter all over the place. And so thinking about, you know, milkweed and pollinator corridors, the Obama administration in 2015 established what's called the Monarch Highway through Interstate 35. This is an attempt working with the state highway departments to create sort of wayside pollinator corridors in the right of waves of highways, stretching from Laredo, Texas to Duluth, Minnesota, to kind of cut through that corn belt of the U.S. Midwest. There's been things like Butterflies and Their People, which is a tri-national organization that really works on environmental justice at the Biosphere Reserve, trying to create long-term jobs because ecotourism is only the four or five months that monarchs are there. It sort of dries up when sort of the tourists leave. And so providing sort of year-round forest preservation through economic development. And so, yeah, we see sort of these kind of transnational relationships that the monarch sort of helps to create because of its trinational integration and trying to think more strategically across the three nation states to think about what are sort of the relationships that can be built that then sort of keep it intact.

EW: 59:09

Well, yeah. And there's just so much about monarch history that is connecting people and connecting landscapes and these homelands that exist for different times in different places. It's such a vibrant story of connection and collaboration that there's so much more to say. There's so much more to look into. I hope that you all will get a chance to read some more of Will's work. We'll put it in the show notes. And thank you so much for joining us. to have this conversation.

WW: 59:40

Yeah, no problem. Thanks for having me.

MB: 59:44

And that's it for this episode of More Than: A Podcast. We hope you've loved what you've learned and we hope it's made you think a little bit differently about nature and about history. We hope you've learned more about the world around you and the histories and stories that make up those places and those more than human beings who are so important to our historical past. We want to thank our guests and our amazing producer, Ruxandra Guidi. We'd also like to give credit to Jason Shaw, who composed our music, Back to the Woods. We'd also like to cite our sound effects from the BBC, and we'll give more specific citation information on our website. There, you can also find sources that we've used and links to other interesting stories to continue your learning. So go check out morethanapodcast.earth. If you'd like to, please leave a review about this podcast and be sure to tune in next time for the next episode of More Than: A Podcast.