Bicycling with Butterflies: My 10,201 - Mile Journey Following the Monarch Migration
By Sara Dykman
Timber Press, April, 2021
If you’d like to know more about migrating monarchs and the environmental threats facing them but would rather not plough through numerous scholarly articles or scientific treatises, I highly recommend reading “Bicycling with Butterflies” by Sara Dykman.
The author set out to pedal the same route that the monarchs take in their annual migration – from Mexico to Canada and back – on what she describes as a “Frankenstein bike” that she made from a collection of used parts. Despite looking like “a cross between a salvage yard and a garage sale,” she said, “it was a reliable machine, a deterrent to theft, a statement against consumerism and my ticket to adventure.”
Dykman’s journey begins at El Rosario monarch sanctuary in Michoacan, Mexico in January, 2017, where she makes friends with a guide and is invited to stay with the young woman and her family for a few weeks while she helps out at the sanctuary until the migration starts. She then cycles the same path the monarchs take, occasionally encountering them, along with the milkweed plants they lay their eggs on and some of their eggs. Along the way, she visits numerous people involved in saving the migratory monarchs – and bit by bit, she provides a lesson in the threats that the monarchs face.
Among those: increasing scarcity of milkweed, loss of forest on which to overwinter, and climate insecurity that can throw off vital mating and migration schedules.
The author is passionate about her cause. Her bike includes a sign announcing her route and website in English and Spanish. Along the way she stops at numerous schools to talk to students about the monarchs. She also stops to talk to people mowing roadsides to discuss the possibility of holding off on the mowing.
She describes her sadness and anger when she witnesses native prairie being bulldozed, but also offers praise for action that supports the monarchs – such as people who grow backyard milkweed or a golf course that leaves some areas unmowed. Or Mexico’s decision to deter deforestation by offering someone from every family living near the butterfly sanctuary the opportunity to work as a tourist guide in the sanctuary, a good paying job for the area.
I’ll admit I was attracted to the book mostly because my favor genre is armchair travel – and travel by bike is my favorite sub-genre. But what I learned about the monarchs and what can be done to help them was compelling. And following the monarchs’ migratory path was a great focus for about the 20th bike travelogue I’ve added to my collection.
Reviewed by Joan Engebretson, who, when not writing, spends time cooking and gardening in Chicago.
