Oyamel Fir in Summer (bonus content)
Companion Chapter
The Irish Music Stories project explores Irish, Scottish, and other Celtic traditions. To accompany podcasts Shannon shares bite-sized essays and poems. This piece is bonus content from the Season 9 “IMS SIDEQUEST” (Episodes 81-86).
This is a story of migratory monarch butterflies, who are are named for late 17th century King William of Orange. These creatures have been in what is now New England for thousands of years. They have survived by spending winters in the warm branches of Oyamel firs in the Mexican mountains of Michoacán.
The Oyamel Fir in Summer
(June 2025)
By mid June, the Oyamels are empty nesters. After hosting millions of monarchs in their branches all winter, the trees gear up for the challenge of summer.
The warm months didn’t used to be so trying for the Oyamels. When the earth was cooler and wetter, the trees spent summers in their little microclimate absorbing moisture on warm days and spreading their branches, before welcoming back their orange roommates in late October. Green firs, towering above a carpet of salvia flowers, covered in a quilt of orange, black, and white; dotted with bright feathers of birds who also wintered with the Oyamels. A colorful and cozy coexistence—and safe for the butterflies whose childhood bellies full of milkweed made them poisonous to the Ruby-throated Hummingbirds, Black-backed Orioles, and Golden-cheeked Woodpeckers.
As many of the tiny migrators settled in their lush winter homes, Mexican people would decorate altars with marigolds. Orange butterfly-like flowers for Dia de los Muertos to signify spirits of ancestors, returning to earth to visit. The locals would sing and tell stories about dead loved ones, and the little monarchs would begin nestling on the boughs of the Abies Religiosa (the Latin name for Oyamels, which comes from their cone-shaped tips, which look like clasped hands praying).
For at least one million years, Oyamels have kept monarchs from freezing on cold nights, and kept them from overheating on warmer days. But there are fewer Oyamel guardians these days. Deforestation and the heat, droughts, storms, and pests that climate change brings have decimated the forests. Hot days have also stressed milkweed plants, which are the primary food and host plants for Northern Monarch caterpillars.
Abies religiosa—and the birds and butterflies that seek refuge in their sacred boughs—will need a miracle (or a lot of funding and coordination) to survive. Only 2% of the original forest, in the highest, most isolated areas, remains. Unless carbon dioxide levels stop creeping up, the last Oyamels in the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve and the plants and animals they support may not adapt soon enough. Conditions are changing just too unnaturally quickly.
Activists have tried pressuring legislators to regulate emissions and pollution. More gardeners are planting milkweed to help restore the monarchs’ summer habitat. Some Mexican scientists are trying assisted migration, trying to relocate the forest higher to save the firs and the butterflies that depend on them. But the humans trying to slow climate change and boost tree and plant populations are unlikely to cross the finish line while ponderous obstacles (like politicians) roll back environmental rules, regulations, and research.
It’s a race to make Oyamels great again.
In the 1500s, Martín de la Cruz wrote about the Oiametl in his manuscript about medicine and botany: mighty trees filled with a “precious and medicinal liquor” used to treat “the fatigue of those administering the government and holding public office.”
If modern rulers could take a sip of the nectar of the sacred Oyamel, perhaps they would feel some rest and refreshment. Perhaps they’d lose some interest in power and profit, and take more notice of the little pollinators who sustain us all.
