King Commuters : Butterfly Enthusiast Tracks Migration of Thousands of Monarchs to, From County

There’s a little visitor in San Diego that not too many people knowabout, even though there are thousands and thousands just like him here every winter.

David Marriott of Clairemont wants to share the secret with everybody and share it soon, because most of them have already left and the others are fluttering right on by.

The visitor is the striking monarch butterfly, which migrates from the Western states to the California coastline around October to revel in the sunshine and escape cold, snowy days. Marriott is searching for the insect’s migration routes, aerial highways for the butterfly with fire-colored wings crisscrossed by shiny black veins.

“I’m definitely obsessed,” Marriott said. “What I like most about it, and what is so exciting for me, is that it’s original work. No one’s done it before (in San Diego). There are few things in life that are new and original. It’s a challenge, like a treasure hunt when you’re a kid, like Columbus discovering America.”

Marriott, founder and president of the nonprofit, San Diego-based Monarch Program, said he became interested in monarch butterfly migration after collecting butterflies for six years. He formed the Monarch Program to educate people about the insect, study its migration pattern and to protect the monarch’s winter habitats by urging developers not to build near trees where they live, he said.

The Monarch Program sponsors “tagging parties” at different monarch roosting sites in San Diego. Most sites are in eucalyptus groves, such as one at UC San Diego, just east of Mandeville Auditorium, where up to 8,000 monarchs wintered this year. A total of 100,000 of the butterflies spent this winter in San Diego County.

At the parties, the 70 members of the 3-month-old program remove hundreds of butterflies from the overhead branches with 35-foot-long nets. Then carefully they rub a small section of scales off of the butterflies’ wings and fold specially coded tags onto them. The tags help members track the butterflies once they leave San Diego for the winter, sometime next week.

Studying monarchs is an avocation for Marriott, who is self-employed, has a Ph.D. in music and teaches an extension course on the butterflies at the university. He spends much of his winter days tagging monarchs in the county.

He recently collected some monarchs from the university and took them to Evans School in La Jolla to show students how to tag them. “People are always fascinated by butterflies, especially children,” Marriott said. “We all have a child in us. I’m still a kid, just running around chasing butterflies all day. . . . If I’m not disturbed, I can tag 125 monarchs in an hour. But the first time I did it, I didn’t know what to do, or how to handle them.”

The tags give written instructions in both English and Spanish to send the butterly, if found dead, back to UC San Diego. Marriott said he has already received some dead butterflies found a few miles away.

The program is one of a handful that track the butterflies. One monarch, for example, was tagged in Morro Bay on Oct. 19 and found at Camp Pendleton on Dec. 14. It had traveled 245 miles.

Some of the monarchs that flew to California this winter had been tagged over the summer in New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado and Utah by Paul Cherubin, a Placerville man who is part of the San Diego program. He has been tagging the butterflies for about 15 years.

Cherubini uses secret codes that represent where and when the butterfly was tagged. Several of his red-tagged creatures were spotted at the UC San Diego site, Marriott said.

Although different generations of monarchs return to the university annually, Marriott said they roost in the same eucalyptus trees on the same branches as their ancestors of three generations ago. But not everybody realizes that thousands of monarchs live at the university every winter, even people who frequent the campus.

“The students here know little about the butterflies, as do people in general,” said UC San Diego biology professor Chris Wills.

Dave MacKenzie, member of San Diego’s Monarch Program, said students walk under the trees and don’t even notice the insects, probably because they look so much like the eucalyptus leaves when they hang upside down with their wings closed.

The university, however, is not the only place in the county where monarchs hibernate. Marriott said at least 30 such habitats exist. The biggest site is at Camp Pendleton, the largest known habitat south of Ventura County, where about 20,000 monarch butterflies wintered.

David Faulkner, chairman of entomology at the San Diego Natural History Museum, said the monarch butterfly is considered a migratory insect because it flies from one point to another as a group. But individually, the monarch is not migratory, because it reproduces and dies rather than flying back to its summer home, he said.

“During the summer they can survive in certain areas with few days of frost that don’t have huge temperature fluctuations,” Faulkner said. “They take advantage of any flowers in bloom when it’s sunny, but when it cools down, they go back to their roosting sites.”

One scientist goes against the mainstream about whether monarch butterflies migrate at all.

Adrian Wenner, professor of natural history at UC Santa Barbara, said the monarch butterflies end up on California’s coastline because the wind takes them there. “I have the opposite interpretation of what everyone else has,” Wenner said. “I have studied them off and on for 30 years in Santa Barbara County, and, as I see it, something triggers the monarchs in the fall, and they fly against the wind and end up on the coast. They don’t have to have long-distance flying abilities to do that.

“A lot of people will just tag them and rush to where they think they are going to go. They don’t know what the path was actually, and they don’t go and check other places where they may have gone. These are not well-designed studies.”