[Leps-l] Discoverer of Monarch Roosting Sites in Mexico Lives a Quiet Life in Austin, Texas

[Mike Quinn]

Wonderful interview of Catalina (Brugger) Trail by Monika Maeckle. Catalina
was one of the original discoverers of some of the monarch's overwintering
sites in central Mexico! Mike Quinn, Austin

Link to on-line story:
http://www.texasbutterflyranch.com/2012/07/10/founder-of-the-monarch-butterfly-roosting-sites-in-mexico-lives-a-quiet-life-in-austin-texas/

or: http://bit.ly/LEXrQ8

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Texas Butterfly Ranch <donotreply at wordpress.com>
Date: Tue, Jul 10, 2012 at 8:14 AM
Subject: [New post] Founder of the Monarch Butterfly Roosting Sites in
Mexico Lives a Quiet Life in Austin, Texas
To: entomike at gmail.com


**
          New post on *Texas Butterfly Ranch*
<http://texasbutterflyranch.zippykid.it/?author=3>  Founder of the Monarch
Butterfly Roosting Sites in Mexico Lives a Quiet Life in Austin,
Texas<http://www.texasbutterflyranch.com/2012/07/10/founder-of-the-monarch-butterfly-roosting-sites-in-mexico-lives-a-quiet-life-in-austin-texas/>
by
Monika Maeckle <http://texasbutterflyranch.zippykid.it/?author=3>

I am the only living member of the team who discovered the Monarch
Butterfly overwintering sanctuaries in Mexico in 1975.  The discovery was
published by National Geographic Magazine in August, 1976.  My picture is
on the cover.  I was referred to as Cathy back then...I have been here in
Austin living a quiet life and I am interested in participating in your
Austin Butterfly Forum.

 --Best regards, Catalina

 [image: Catalina Trail, January 2, 1975, the day she and Ken Brugger
"discovered" the Monarch butterfly Overwintering Sites]

Catalina Trail, January 2, 1975, the day she and Ken Brugger "discovered"
the Monarch butterfly overwintering sites Photo copyright Catalina Trail

The best and brightest Monarch butterfly entomologists and citizen
scientists gathered in Minneapolis in late June for the annual Monarch
Butterfly Conservation
Meeting<http://www.mndaily.com/2012/06/27/u-hosts-int’l-monarch-conference>
hosted
by the University of Minnesota. More than 100 Monarch aficionados,
conservationists and citizen scientists joined academic heavyweights like
Chip Taylor, Lincoln Brower, and Karen Oberhauser at the three-day "Monarch
Geek Festival." Participants enjoyed sessions on  topics ranging from
rearing Monarchs to conservation habitat management.

Yet one key player in contemporary Monarch history, a soft-spoken woman
whose pivotal role helped unravel the mystery of the Monarch butterfly
overwintering sites, was not in attendance:  Catalina Trail of Austin,
Texas.

 Catalina Trail, then known as Cathy Aguado, was the woman on the cover of
National Geographic in 1976

"Cathy Aguado," as she was known in 1975 when she and her partner Ken
Brugger worked as "research associates" for Dr. Fred Urquhart, remained at
her South Austin home.  Trail now performs social work as a case manager
for an Austin nonprofit organization, helping people face some of life's
toughest challenges.  In her limited spare time, she tends her vegetable
garden.

"I live a quiet life," she said during a recent interview at a South Austin
restaurant.

When Trail left a comment on the Texas Butterfly Ranch blog on May 24, I
gasped audibly.  *Really?  *The woman busting through the magical wall of
Monarch butterflies on the cover of the August 1976 National Geographic
Magazine lives and works in Austin?  Why have we never heard from her?  And
how many times had I looked at that photo and wondered:  *Who is she?  What
was she thinking? How did it happen?  She's so lucky.*

Born on a ranch in the mountains at El Salto, in the Mexican state of
Michoacan in 1949, Trail grew up outside Morelia, the state capitol.  She
and her partner Ken Brugger would be the first Westerners to walk among and
make sense of the millions of Monarch butterflies roosting in the Oyamel
trees of the Michoacan forest in Cerro Pelón, about 120 miles east of her
birthplace.

Their "discovery"--and I use the quotation marks deliberately, since native
people knew of the overwintering sites for centuries before Westerners
pieced the migration puzzle together--occurred on January 2, 1975.  Trail
was 25 years old.

[image: Catalina Trail, always a bit of a free spirit, traveled the
hemisphere in the 70s.]

Free spirit and itinerant traveler Catalina Trail traveled the hemisphere
in the 70s. Photo copyright Catalina Trail

Trail had always displayed a sense of curiosity and adventure.  As a child,
she would sneak off to the library at the *Universidad de San Nicólas de
Hidalgo* to peruse books on science.   "I was the girl that played with
insects," she said, adding that after mountain rains, she would observe
Mexican blues, Gulf Fritillaries and miscellaneous Swallowtails puddling in
a seasonal stream near her house.  "I'm not a scientist.  I'm a gardener
that likes insects."

[image: El Salto to Cerro Pelon]

A = Birthplace of Catalina Trail; B = Discovering of Monarch roosting
spots. Map by Google

When she was almost 12 years old, Trail moved with one of her five sisters
from the ranch to Morelia.  By age 17, she was living in Mexico City,
working at a pharmacy and later in sales for *Philips Comercial.*

During the 70s, she roamed the hemisphere, a fearless,  free-spirited young
woman who explored Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador and many points south.
 She traversed the United States and Canada--alone and with friends.  They
rode buses and slept in cheap hotels, sometimes camping along the way,
satisfying their wanderlust and search for adventure.

Trail was only 21 when she met Brugger, a smart, charming *norteamericano, *who
worked as a self-taught engineer at textile giant *Rinbros* in Mexico City.
  Brugger loved trading the brutal winters of Wisconsin  for the warmth of
Mexico.  He took every opportunity to explore the country from his
Winnebago.  A Canadian friend introduced the two in Acapulco when Catalina
was taking a break from her Mexico City job and was visiting the Pacific
Coast resort to attend immersion English classes.

Naturally, the 53-year-old Brugger found Trail captivating.  "He followed
me around," said Trail. When she departed for a trip to El Salvador, "he
wrote me letters on the back of a tortilla."

[image: Catalina Trail in her South Austin vegetable garden]

Catalina Trail in her South Austin vegetable garden.

Trail said she and Brugger first started looking for Monarch butterflies in
1973, a year before their marriage in Austin. Ken had seen an ad placed by
Dr. Fred Urquhart in the *Mexico City News*, an English language newspaper,
seeking "research associates" to help track Monarch butterflies.  The job
was voluntary at first, and Brugger thought it would be fun. "C'mon, want
to do it?" he asked her.  At first she hesitated.  "Good luck with the *
campesinos* and the Mexican government," she said.

Ultimately, Brugger convinced "Cathy" as he called her, a name she never
liked, to join the Monarch quest.  Luckily she did, and surely her native
smarts and Spanish fluency, plus her familiarity with the people and the
countryside, proved key to locating the overwintering sites.   Anyone who's
traveled in rural Mexico can attest to the suspicion native residents have
toward outsiders. <http://www.robertrivard.com/>   One could argue that
were it not for Trail, the Monarch butterfly roosting sites would not have
been revealed to the world in 1976.  It would have happened, but later.

[image: Monarch butterflies in Cerro Pelon, Michoacan, Mexico]

Cerro Pelón in 2011. This was the first roosting spot found by Trail and
Brugger in 1975.

Brugger and Trail took weekend trips to Morelia throughout 1973 to look for
Monarch butterflies. It wasn't until 1974, as they came closer to finding
the roosting spots and after reporting regularly to Urquhart of their
progress, that the couple received compensation for their time -- room,
board, expenses, and car rental.

"That's when we started taking it more seriously," said Trail.

In October 1974,  Brugger and Trail saw pulses of Monarchs moving west from
Mexico City.  Urquhart had also received reports around that time that at
least some of his experimental Monarch butterfly tags had been recovered
northwest of the capitol.  Evidence mounted that Monarchs were heading to
Michoacán.

"We decided to go get supplies and topo maps," said Trail.  Because of work
obligations, they had to squeeze their research into weekends and days off.
 "We knew where we had to look."

Trail described several wild adventures, including Winnebago breakdowns and
arduous climbs up difficult mountain trails.  On their research excursions,
she always carried photos of  Monarch butterflies in their various stages,
asking every *campesino* and *viejo*:  have you seen these?

"Fred gave us some pictures from his collection, a mounted butterfly, and
photos of butterfly, chrysalis and caterpillar," said Trail.  "I always
told them:  we're doing it for science."

Nobody they asked ever admitted to seeing the butterflies, she said.  And
this is where her story departs from accepted Monarch history.  In the book
*Four Wings and a Prayer,* author Sue Halpern relates a conversation with
Brugger in which he describes dangerous encounters.

[image: Catalina Trail, A Founder of Monarch Butterfly Overwintering Sites,
1975]

Catalina Trail in Cerro Pelón, 1975, the first site "discovered" by she and
Ken Brugger.  Photo copyright Catalina Trail

"'We went through a lot of dangerous territory.  People threatened to shoot
us.  They told us that Zapata had hidden some gold up there and they
thought we were looking for that,'" Ken Brugger told Halpern in the book.
In the National Geographic story, Urquhart describes a scene in which
"Mexican woodcutters, prodding laden donkeys, had seen swarming butterflies
and had helped point the way" to the roosting site.

Trail tells a different story.  "We went all along Route 15, Macho de Agua,
El Capulín, Popocatepetl, and Nevado de Toluca areas, asking everyone.
Nobody admitted to seeing butterflies like that--they didn't know what we
were talking about." Trail said her former husband was not well in his old
age.  By the time Halpern interviewed him, sometime before the book's
publication in 2001, Brugger often spoke nonsensically.  "That's not the
way it happened, and Ken never corrected that.  I told him it was wrong and
he said it didn't matter."

Trail said she and Brugger had hired a local "so we wouldn't be alone" and
routinely hiked 18 kilometers a day over the skirt of the mountain and back
to their camper or inn at day's end.

Finally, on January 2, 1975, the couple came upon Cerro Pelón, a dramatic
high elevation summit that spills into an *arroyo*, or dry streambed.
 "That's when we saw them," recalled Trail.

The location hosted what seemed to be a Monarch butterfly superhighway and
fir trees laden with millions of the roosting creatures.   Occasional dead
butterflies littered the forest floor.

[image: Catalina Trail, then known as Cathy Aguado, in Cerro Pelon on
January 2, 1975]

Trail was first to the site at Cerro Pelón on January 2, 1975. Photo
copyright Catalina Trail.

Trail was first to the site.   Brugger and their helper (you can see him
behind Trail in the photo above) brought up the rear with food, water, and
gear, including a camera that snapped the photographs reprinted in this
story.

"I see them! I see them!" she yelled.

Two days later, they came upon Chincua and El Rosario.

"That second day, it snowed," Trail remembered.  Brugger and Trail found
five colonies on that trip and raced to Tuxpan to relay the news to
Urquhart by phone.  Urquhart recalled the phone call in the story he wrote
for National Geographic.  "On the evening of January 9, 1975, Ken
telephoned us from Mexico. 'We have located the colony!' he said, unable to
control the excitement in his voice. 'We have found them--millions of
Monarchs--in evergreens beside a mountain clearing.' "

An entire year later, Fred and Nora Urquhart, and photographer Bianca
Lavies joined Trail and Brugger in Mexico to visit the roosting sites. The
fantastic photo of Trail graced the front of the magazine, her historic
role in the discovery reduced to cover girl and a vague reference by
Urquhart to a "bright and delightful Mexican, 'Cathy.'"  The explosive
story and dramatic photos inside rocked the world of lepidoptery.

Trail and Brugger returned to Michoacan in 1978 together for the last time.
 "I was almost sad that we had found them because everything was in such
disarray in the first few years," said Trail recently.  "And there was a
lot of controversy," she said, referring to myriad disagreements about
scientific credit-taking that followed.  The drama and disagreement
explains why Trail dropped out of the Monarch story for decades. Halpern's
book, *Four Wings and a Prayer,* chronicles the saga.

Trail and Brugger, married for 18 years, separated in 1991.  Her desire to
earn a formal education at Austin Community College seemed to unnerve her
older husband and caused problems.   They eventually divorced, and in 1993
Trail married a fellow social worker, George Trail.  In 1996 Trail
graduated with a degree in social work from the University of Texas at
Austin.  Brugger died at age 80 and his grown son by Trail, whose privacy
she chooses to protect, also lives in Austin.

Trail returned to the roosting sanctuaries in February for the first time
in 34 years.  Canadian filmmakers invited her as their guest in the course
of filming the documentary, *Flight of the Butterflies*.    "During the
trip from Mexico City Airport to El Rosario, federal and state police
patrolled the roads and the sanctuary,"  she said, describing "mixed
feelings of safety and dread, which surprised me as a native Mexican in
Michoacan.”  Trail missed an opportunity to meet President Felipe
Calderon<http://www.texasbutterflyranch.com/2012/03/05/mexican-president-felipe-calderon-visits-monarch-butterfly-preserves-in-michoacan/>
who
took part in the IMAX film, since her return to Austin was scheduled prior
to his arrival at the Monarch sanctuaries.

For Trail, as for many of us, a fascination with Monarch butterflies is
almost impossible to shake. She'd like to get involved in Monarch
conservation again and plans to attend future meetings of the Austin
Butterfly Forum <http://www.austinbutterflies.org>.  Since she doesn't
spend much time on the computer, she doesn't participate in the hyperactive
online Monarch butterfly information exchange.  "I'd rather look at the
tassels of my corn and hope the pollen will fall down and pollinate," she
said.

Her journey to find the Mexican mountain home for Monarch butterflies, and
her place in Monarch history, remain.   A few years ago, about 100 Monarchs
roosted in her garden one fall evening.   It was a reunion of sorts.

"I had my own little colony, and I stayed up all night."
*Like what you’re reading?  Follow butterfly and native plant news at the Texas
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 *Monika Maeckle <http://texasbutterflyranch.zippykid.it/?author=3>* | July
10, 2012 at 8:13 am | Tags: butterfly life
cycle<http://texasbutterflyranch.zippykid.it/?tag=butterfly-life-cycle>,
mexico <http://texasbutterflyranch.zippykid.it/?tag=mexico>, monarch
butterfly <http://texasbutterflyranch.zippykid.it/?tag=monarch-butterfly>,
monarch
butterfly migration<http://texasbutterflyranch.zippykid.it/?tag=monarch-butterfly-migration>,
monarch migration<http://texasbutterflyranch.zippykid.it/?tag=monarch-migration>|
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