Bicycling biologist pedals 10,000 miles along the Monarch butterfly’s migration route

TAYLOR, TEXAS—It’s a cool, cloudy late-October morning in this small Texas town. Sara Dykman is outside a Wal-Mart, and she is, by her own admission, a bit grouchy.

But then you might be a bit grouchy too if you’d been pedaling a 90-pound bike eight hours a day for eight months along the 10,000-mile monarch butterfly migration route.

Ms. Dykman has been biking since March, when she left the alpine forest sanctuaries in Mexico’s Michoacán province where the iconic orange and black monarchs overwinter. The butterflies leave at the same time each year, embarking on a nine-month migration loop that winds over much of the United States and as far north as Canada, before returning in the fall to the same forests in Michoacán.

Twenty years ago, some one billion monarchs overwintered in Michoacán, enough to fill some three dozen football fields. During the winter of 2013-2014, a record low 33.9 million butterflies arrived in the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve, not even enough to fill two football fields, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council.

On this cloudy morning, Dykman is biking along country back roads – and into a fierce headwind – to Austin, Texas. She is due to give a half-dozen presentations at schools around the city. She has been visiting at schools throughout her trip, talking about her adventures, the various pressures on the monarch, and how kids can help by planting milkweed and nectar gardens.

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