A Plague of Butterflies

*Image courtesy of the New York Times, "In Texas, Conditions Lead to a Rabble of Butterflies" Thursday, July 27, 2006.

I've always thought of butterflies as the hearts with which God dots his i's-- sweet little affectations of the insect world that offset things like the dung beetle and giant bat-eating centipedes. Of course, I've also never witnessed a butterfly migration.

The fetchingly named American Snout is migrating through our town right now. At first there was just a light sprinkling of them, maybe ten in the space of a city block, but now they're coming quite literally by the thousands, in thick, low-rolling clouds.

There's something distinctly unsettling about walking around outside with what feels like a million dead leaves whirling chaotically around you at waist height, in silence, and with no breeze. Driving is even worse-- my windshield is covered in shimmery butterfly gore, and the grill of my radiator is a ghastly congestion of cooked and impaled butterfly bodies. In parking lots around town I've watched grackles wait for the grills of pick-ups to cool so they could perch on the front license plate and peck out a hearty butterfly meal.

Intellectually, I know this is a natural process-- there has been a population explosion of the American Snout down in Latin America somewhere, and now galaxies of them are headed north, as they do every year. There will be a culling of the herd, perhaps half or more, lost to 18-wheelers and predatory birds. But having never before been in the thick of any kind of significant, natural migration, (living in cities tends to preclude that) I feel kind of startled and unnerved finally witnessing one. It's like watching God on a drunken spending spree-- surely he can't afford this kind of promiscuous profusion.

Put another way, it's easy to imagine blinding excess on the part of human populations (we invented the glitzy civilian Hummer and triple E breast implants, after all), but unsettling to see it in nature, even if the numbers do eventually even out.