Urquhart at 85

(This column was published on December 16, 1996 in The Buffalo News.)

   Last week was quite remarkable for natural history on the Niagara Frontier. 
On Wednesday the Niagara River Corridor was celebrated by the National Audubon 
Society and the Canadian Nature Federation as their first global Important 
Bird Area, a salute to the thousands of gulls and waterfowl -- and attendant 
bird watchers -- drawn here each winter. Then on Saturday the spectacular new 
Butterfly Conservatory opened on the grounds of the Niagara Parks Botanical 
Gardens, offering visitors a stroll through a tropical rain forest among 
hundreds of startlingly beautiful exotic lepidoptera. And, of course, even 
those events were eclipsed by a biological phenomenon: thousands of our own 
species attracted like ants to the pheromone-like properties of the slot 
machines and gaming tables of Casino Niagara.

   But something else also occurred last week, a happening that few of us even 
in the scientific community noted. On Friday December 13th many friends helped 
Fred Urquhart celebrate his 85th birthday.

   Who is Fred Urquhart and why does he deserve our attention?

   Now emeritus Professor Urquhart of the University of Toronto devoted most 
of his life single-mindedly to study of the monarch butterfly. Some readers 
may be taken aback at this focus of an academic on a single insect, no matter 
how attractive, but Urquhart's studies, especially those of monarch migration, 
have led to deep insights into animal behavior. In fact, the lines of 
investigation his work opened are currently being extended by entomologists 
around the world.

   Professor Urquhart began in 1937 to experiment with different ways of 
marking these delicate insects in order to study their migration patterns, 
eventually developing and refining the method of applying an alar tag to the 
monarch's wing. He first labeled these tags by hand with India ink, later 
typewriting thousands and thousands of them. Volunteers across North America 
applied the markers to tiny orange and black wings in hope that others would 
net at least a few of the released butterflies and report back the locale at 
which they were collected.

   Bird banders will appreciate the process, but they should also appreciate 
the additional dexterity necessary to fasten these tags without permanently 
damaging the butterflies' wing scales.

   In 1952 Urquhart created the Insect Migration Association to organize his 
studies, but in those early years he received little institutional 
encouragement or financial support. Only later have his colleagues 
acknowledged the ground-breaking role of his 1960 monograph, simply titled 
"The Monarch Butterfly." 

   Not until 1976 did he begin to garner the attention he deserved. In that 
year Urquhart's discovery of the winter habitat near Mexico City of millions 
of monarchs was published in both "National Geographic" and his second book, 
"The Monarch Butterfly: International Traveler."  That site has become an 
increasingly popular tourist attraction over the years.

   As I write this column, I have before me a thick 1993 volume entitled 
"Biology and Conservation of the Monarch Butterfly."  It encompasses over 40 
research papers. Their authors talk about cardenolide glycosides -- the 
noxious chemicals monarchs pick up from the milkweed plants on which they most 
often feed. About Batesian mimicry -- the copy-cat coloration of viceroy 
butterflies repelling predators who have learned not to eat the distasteful 
monarchs. And about annual recolonization patterns -- how northern regions 
like ours are usually repopulated by a new generation of monarchs each year. 
Urquhart is mentioned in these essays only rarely, but almost every 
"Literature Cited" section includes several of his publications. He was 
clearly the progenitor of this field of study.

   I urge the administrators of the new Butterfly Conservatory to acknowledge 
the contributions of this retired professor by honoring him at their formal 
opening ceremonies next spring.