As problematic as it is to try to communicate the magnificence of a natural phenomenon through an allusion to a fictitious one, this is all I’ve got: it’s like a scene from a fairy tale. Think of the birds swooping in to draw Cinderella’s robe over her shoulders in the Disney film or the rabbits hobnobbing in the fields in the Secrets of NIMH and you’ve probably got a sense for the feels I’m feeling at what lies before me: a kaleidoscope of butterflies flocking everywhere within the wooded glade that we’ve just entered at the beginning of our descent into St. Juan de Ortega.
Just picture it if you can. Picture the thousands of them, each the colour of phoenix-fire and ash, igniting and smouldering in the dapple-dark wood. In fours and fives and sixes, they are sunning and feasting on the white carpets of wild carrot lining the path. In twos and twos and twos, some rise, weaving in and out of the deeper shade beneath the trees. I lose count of the pairs lofting in an entwined dance—one butterfly encircling the other in midflight and rising up before its mate like a burning cinder that has caught an updraft.
I am in love with this glade, and never want to leave.
In truth, their beauty is compounded by their numbers. Beyond occasional visits to the butterfly exhibit at my local public museum, I have never seen butterflies congregating like this, so active and restive and alive together, communing with the sun and the wind, the bramble and the blessed shadow of the grandfather trees beyond. It’s as if I’ve stumbled into a secret society. I suppose that is what witnessing colonies of other creatures feels like to most nature-lovers without scientific training . . . and, I guess, everyone else. Land communities are full of lives lived more or less without comment, almost invisibly, just like these butterflies. Un-surveilled, unnoted, they will live out their short or longer lives and die, lest they present themselves like this—in such a dominating way that humans cannot help but pay attention to their presence.
I will discover through photo identification that they are Silver Washed Fritillaries, and they have just emerged into adulthood. One life-cycle before, their mothers flew into this shaded woodland, fluttering around the bases of the rough-barked oak trees, laying their eggs one by one within the northern exposed crevices of the trees’ bark. Unlike most species, they don’t lay their eggs directly on the food source that their offspring will seek. They nonetheless select their wood-cradles strategically—in places several meters above where the larvae, once hatched, can feed on dog violet.
Now and always, they are performing their own generational labour. It is late June, so the females have just emerged from the pupae stage, just in time for us to witness burgeoning life. With most of both sexes anticipated to live only a month, a few will persist with wings tattered and full of stories, through September.
We are lucky that the day is still and suitably warm, as the sun falls toward the western horizon, and when it fails to appear from beneath clouds, these butterflies will camp out in the tops of the oak trees, never to be seen by the pilgrims walking below. Silver Washed Fritillaries only drift down to the forest floor when the weather suits. Then, and only then, they get to the business of living: basking and airing their wings, feasting on the low vegetation, puddling to drink in mineral water given up by the earth.
We are equally lucky that we are passing through this section of the forest just before noon. Our decision to leave Belorado at six in the morning means that we will arrive at St. Juan de Ortega before the sun meets its apex. Avoiding the afternoon heat was the first and final objective we had in leaving so early . . . but now, I realise, there is a second gift that arises from the decision: the chance to see the pas de deux of the butterflies as they mate—a choreography that most commonly happens in late morning. As we walk languidly along the Way, the earnestness of their intricate, spiralling flight patterns is creating a breeze.
Over sixty years ago, an MIT meteorologist named Edward Lorenz reconfigured our understanding of cause and effect. It had been widely thought and culturally accepted—from historians to behavioural scientists to mathematicians—that small changes have small consequences, and big changes have big consequences. You want a revolution? Organise those colonies or storm the Bastille. You want a life change? Get that divorce, take up hang gliding, or quit cold turkey. You want more of the proverbial pi? Use whole numbers.
But with one simple calculation, Lorenz threw out this broadly accepted calculus of change. Earlier that day, he had run a basic weather simulation using a series of previously observed variables such as wind speed and barometric pressure and temperature. For one such variable, he had run the calculation using the complete decimal .506127 In the afternoon, he ran the simulation again after errantly rounding it to .506.
He was dumbfounded when the simulation was done. That missing .000127 of a percent had radically altered the projected pattern of weather around the globe for the length of the simulation. This nominal numerical variation equated to a nearly imperceptible breeze in the simulation, little more than the wind speed of a butterfly flapping its wings. And yet, leaving it off the calculus dissolved tornadoes from the forecast halfway around the world.
As he analysed and tinkered with the bewildering datasets he had before him, he would come to develop, argue, and defend the radical idea that what happens in a chain of events has a sensitive dependence on initial conditions. A basic premise of chaos theory, it would become known as the Butterfly Effect.
Pyrenean oak forests—the preferred habitat for these beautiful wonders of fire-flight—make up about 6% of Spain’s national forests. Seventy per cent of that acreage, some 700,000 hectares, lies here in this western region of Castilla y Leon. Satellite data from the Global Forest Watch interactive map—which tracks deforestation around the world—shows very little deforestation within this massive forest spanning between the La Rioja border and Burgos over the past decade. Galicia as a whole, and the forest regions between Spain and Portugal, present an alarmingly different story.
Like many of Spain and Europe’s oak forests, however, this forest is experiencing what is called oak degradation—a concerning die-off of the nation’s native oaks due to a complex of disease, fire, and human intervention. If these forests are holding on, some Spanish naturalists fear it is only a matter of time before the degradation begins taking measurable effects. Environmental educators like pilgrim Iñigo Urrutia are keeping a watchful eye. “Spain has the third highest number of butterfly species in Europe,” he notes, “but their habitats, especially along the Camino and the forests of western Spain, are increasingly threatened.”
The founder of the non-profit association Serantes-Natur-Eskola, Iñigo teaches interactive environmental education in Serantes, Spain. During his summer holidays, he walks one or more of the Caminos, collecting data and footage of the butterflies and other species he encounters along the Way. In the spring of 2020, he led an initiative that would have enabled Camino communities that are set in butterfly-rich habitats to create large public murals along the walls of buildings that grace the Way. Brightly colored, each mural would be designed by the community and feature its neighbour butterflies. With members of the community and pilgrims working side by side to create it, the initiative would have used art and collaborative community placemaking to frame new and sustaining awareness of the fluttering lives lived out in chorale with us—the ones that are there, but which we may never see. The initiative was put on hold as the realities of the pandemic set in, but the time has come to pick it up again.
What then is to become of this allée of graceful beings? It is amazing to think, all these years later, of the truth of Lorenz’s conclusions: that what happens in a chain of events has a sensitive dependence on initial conditions.
Had we left a little later or sooner in the season or the day, we might have missed the colony of Silver Washed Fritillaries at rest and play.
Had the day been a little cooler or more overcast, we surely would have.
Had we not seen them in their native habitat, the world of my being would have continued to turn, surely, but with a little less wonder, less shimmering residue of encounter, and a weakened sense of connectivity to lives that are as vulnerable, dependent, and interconnected as my own.
Had I not wondered, a sensation of encounter and sense of connectivity, I would have never begun researching their habitat, and the deforestation of Spain’s forests, or asking the difficult questions of the role that pilgrimage culture plays in its environmental degradation as a whole.
Had I not started asking said questions, I would not have started and continued conversations with amazing pilgrims like Iñigo or become a voice for his work.
Without the whole of these experiences, I wouldn’t have felt compelled to write about them, and you, my dear reader, wouldn’t be poised to consider these wonders, questions, and challenges for yourself.
Such, I guess, is the butterfly effect.
