Monarch butterfly migration means Mexican forests look like they are on fire!

Monarch Butterflies in Michoacan, Mexico (Getty)

EACH year, the forests of Michoacan, Mexico, are transformed with bright colours and golden leaves on the trees.

Except they aren’t leaves — look more closely and you’ll realise they are hundreds of millions of butterflies!

As far back as people can recall, these Monarch butterflies depart from their usual homes in Canada and the USA to fly 2,500 miles to Michoacan, the largest insect migration in our world.

As they cluster together on the trees, ground and everywhere else, this part of Mexico looks like a gigantic carpet of orange and black.

Magnificent as it all is, however, it is under threat from the usual suspects of humans and their greed.

The butterflies come from Toronto and Winnipeg, Detroit and elsewhere, guided on their magical trip by the stars, and by magnetic fields.

They’re at Michoacan by late October to make their winter habitat in the trees, high up in the mountains, and will spend five long months there.

There are so many — and a butterfly ain’t heavy — that smaller branches of the trees can bend or even break.

It’s here they mate, and then they take to the skies when the morning dew dries, coming down to Earth and covering the ground.

The whole sanctuary here is protected by the law, but this hasn’t prevented illegal loggers from cutting down many of the trees.

Rarely made to pay for their crimes, or even apprehended, the logging crews had cleared large areas of forest before locals took the law into their own hands.

Recently, however, a mining corporation has reopened an old mine, which threatens to further damage this magical place, and this could spell the end for these mass-butterfly migrations.

The use of herbicides, too, is a further peril, and as milkweed is lost so, too, are the butterflies — they need it to help develop eggs.

Nobody knows if the insects will migrate somewhere else, giving up on Mexico, or continue coming in the hope humans will finally help.

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