What it’s like to run the 4,000-km migration route of the endangered monarch butterfly

Every year, millions of eastern monarch butterflies travel 4,000 kilometres from the Great Lakes to the forests of the Sierra Madre Mountains in Mexico. They’ll only make the trip once, and it will be their descendents that return.

It’s an arduous journey that only a few people have experienced even a portion of. A group of ultra-marathoners, a filmmaker and conservationists are among them. In 2019, the Monarch Ultra marathon saw 46 people, over seven weeks, running stretches of the route from 50 to 100 kilometres at a time, starting in Peterborough, Ont., and ending in Macheros, Mexico. Each leg was its own ultra-marathon: a run longer than the standard marathon distance of 42 kilometres.

Local runners joined in for stretches along the route and environmental organizations in Canada, the U.S. and Mexico joined the cause: drawing attention to the steep decline of the iconic orange and black butterfly. That’s also the goal of a new film about the migration-focused run — The Monarch Ultra Documentary, premiering this week in Peterborough. 

A February 2024 report from the World Wildlife Fund and partners shows overwintering monarchs covered nearly 60 per cent less land in 2023 than the previous year. The sheer number of eastern monarchs (estimated to be in the millions, though down from the billions in the 1990s) and the fact that they congregate as they overwinter, lends itself to measuring the population by the amount of land they occupy as they hibernate.

Monarchs face several compounding threats. Their caterpillars can only live on milkweed; those tall stalks with soft green pods containing seeds with white feathery tails that float in the wind. The plant has a naturally genius method for seed dissemination, but if there’s no soft place to land and germinate, the seed’s efforts are in vain. Development and farming practices in North America, where monarchs mate, along with logging in the forests where they overwinter in Mexico, threaten the butterfly’s food and habitat.

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Exposure to pesticides and extreme weather brought on by climate change create an even more hostile world for monarch butterflies.

Filmmaker Rodney Fuentes says running the migration route was a chance to witness and experience a part of that challenge, and better understand the weight of our impact on the environment. 

“We make decisions on the environment from an office, or we talk so much about how we need to do this on the environment or that, from the comfort of our homes,” he says. “But very rarely do we actually put ourselves out of our comfort zone to kind of be more sympathetic to what nature actually has to go through on a single day. And that’s not just monarchs, that’s nature in general.”

Run founder Carlotta James recruited Fuentes to the project, along with marathon planner Clay Williams and chef Gunther Schubert. Their goal was to draw attention to the monarch butterfly decline, its journey and its struggle, while fundraising for conservation efforts in the Mexican forests monarchs rely on.

“When one species disappears, it’s likely more will disappear,” Fuentes says. “It’s a barometer of what is actually happening in the environment.”

With The Monarch Ultra Documentary premiering on Oct. 23, The Narwhal sat down with Fuentes to talk about the project and the story it tells, which is about so much more than the monarch butterfly.

How did this all get started? Where did the idea to run the route of the monarch butterfly migration, and make a documentary about it, come from?

In January 2019 I had an email from a stranger called Carlotta James, and she said she wanted to meet with me regarding a documentary, an idea that involved ultra-running and butterflies. And I said, “I’m intrigued.” 

She’s a landscaper, and she’s been involved with Peterborough Pollinators and doing a lot of insect pollinator advocacy. She’s also a marathon runner, so that’s why she kind of started thinking about creating a route that followed the migration. It’s kind of like trying to see the world through the butterfly’s eyes, without flying, just doing it on our feet. And the reason for doing it on our feet was because it takes a lot of resilience for an insect to fly 4,000 kilometres. So if we want to try to mimic that migration, we kind of need to feel that pain a little bit. And for a human to run 50 kilometres or 100 kilometres, it’s really hard. You’ve got to really train hard to do it. That’s why it had to be an ultra-marathon, every leg we ran to Mexico, and that’s why we named it the Monarch Ultra marathon. 

Why was the documentary aspect so important to this project?

Documentary is one of the best ways to communicate this kind of message. They tend to be very powerful in terms of drawing emotions from an audience, and Carlotta knew that … now, what she had in mind is not what we turned out.

How so?

We were going to run to Mexico and we were going to raise awareness about monarch butterflies, and that might be maybe a 25-minute documentary or something like that. But as a filmmaker, and with Carlotta, we both realized that we cannot tell the story without an antagonist. 

We were leaving for the seven weeks that it took us to run to Mexico. None of us are getting paid for the seven weeks. We have to leave our home with our family, Carlotta and I both have young children, so that’s really hard on its own right there. So I thought, well, it has to be worth it. Why are we really doing this? 

And so I had to dig more into the challenges the butterfly has on its survival to expand more on that. So as we started expanding more, and we started learning about Mexico, and started learning what’s going on in some parts of the U.S., then I realized that this film was not going to be straightforward.

What were some of those things that you learned that you thought, ‘Well, this really complicates things’?

There’s gonna be some spoilers here if I say that. We’ll save some for the film, but for example, I know that deforestation is a problem, and I know using pesticide is a problem, but when you’re driving south in Midwest U.S.A., and you can drive for days and days, and all you see is monocultures of corn and soy, and that used to be habitat for insect pollinators and other wildlife, then you start thinking, ‘How are they going to find food to survive?’ And of course, all those things are getting pesticides. But I didn’t even see a crow flying by in many of those areas. It’s like a desert. It’s a desolate land. It’s a cemetery. So it was very impactful. 

In Mexico, we found out that people that protect the forest when the monarchs are there are the same ones that are cutting down the trees when the monarchs aren’t there. When you’re poor and you don’t have any money, you’re going to do whatever it takes to feed your family. So if there’s no monarchs, there are no tourists, if there are no tourists: ‘I’m not getting paid to patrol the forest, but my kids are starting school, I need to buy books and uniforms and all the things. So how am I going to get the money?’ Well, the easiest way is to cut down a couple trees and sell the wood. And that’s amongst many other problems. 

But poverty is an issue in the U.S. as well, and in Canada, because for people who are struggling to feed their families, conservation and the environment becomes a luxury, and it’s a luxury they don’t have. 

So from pesticide use to climate change, pollution and other things, there’s a little more to the story, and that is the economical society problems that affect conservation in a big way.

Was there a specific leg of the ultra that was the most challenging or the most eye opening? 

The most challenging was running between Arkansas and Texas. We had to go along highways, and that was very, very taxing on all of us. We actually counted: there was about one car for every eight trucks. On those highways it’s just truck after truck after truck, and it kind of made us think so much about consumerism and how we purchase things, and that everything has to be shipped by trucks. It was really eye-opening — I would say over a week, we didn’t have a rest. You’re constantly hearing those trucks going in your ear.

Is there a single thing you hope people take away from seeing the documentary — a specific message or action that you want them to have in mind?

The main takeaway is what you can do for the environment. The biggest, best thing you can do is what you can do in your own home and what you can do in your own neighbourhood. 

And I think that’s the main message I want people to take is — yeah, you’re not powerless. You actually can speak to city councils, you can plant milkweed in your yard, those kinds of basic things to be aware of. All we need to do is a very minimal thing to contribute. And that’s far better than trying just to save the world. You just have to be more simplistic in that approach, and just look at what you can do in your own community.

Was that part of the thinking behind focusing on monarchs, a hopeful lens in that there are these small actions, like planting milkweed, that can have a big impact? 

 We’re talking about biodiversity. 

Biodiversity is very complex, and we need to protect them all. To protect every single species, it’s the exact same approach, it doesn’t change, which is habitat protection. You protect their habitat, you reduce pollution, you reduce pesticide use, basically 99 per cent of wildlife would benefit from it, right? 

So the answer to me is pretty simple in that regard. The monarch butterfly is a symbol that can actually remind us about it. Why did we choose monarchs and not all the butterflies? Well, because the monarch is the only one we know in this continent that flies to a place it has never been before.

No one can explain that. It’s called the miracle of life, and that is what makes monarchs unique. There are beautiful butterflies, but no one does what monarchs do. So what better species to be the face of insect pollinators than something who does something so extraordinary that can catch our eyes and our attention.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.