Logging Endangers Mexico Butterflies

[ballparent]

This isn't just Mexican butterflies, they're our Monarch butterflies that migrate to Mexico to winter. They spend the winter there and then early in the spring start the cycle moving north across the US until they reach our area in July or August. This is another one of the places one day I'd like to visit. It would make a nice winter vacation. Oh, and how many of you have raised monarchs? If you haven't it's an easy fun thing to do.
Here's a video of the area:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DupPcrxYvUU&feature=related

Logging endangers Mexico butterflies Tue Mar 11, 10:51 AM ET

MEXICO CITY - Satellite photographs show illegal loggers have clear-cut large swathes of trees in the heart of a monarch butterfly reserve in Mexico, threatening the insects' habitat, a researcher said Monday.

The images show illegal loggers chopped 1,100 acres of trees since 2004 in the core of a wooded park in Michoacan state where clouds of orange- and black-winged butterflies nest each winter, said Lincoln Brower, a professor emeritus of biology at Sweet Briar College in Virginia, who has studied the monarchs for 52 years.

"The butterfly area can't survive if this kind of logging continues," said Brower, who also directs the preservation group that paid for the satellite images. He noted that the delicate creatures need leafy foliage to protect them from rain and cold.

Each September, the butterflies begin a 3,400-mile journey from the forests of eastern Canada and parts of the U.S. to the central Mexican mountains. The voyage is considered a scientific wonder and it is also a major tourist attraction.

A Mexican presidential decree issued in November, 2000, forbids logging in the central zone of the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve, a 124,000-acre area that spans Michoacan and Mexico states. However, regulation has been spotty.

Mexico's environmental protection agency, Profepa, didn't return several phone messages seeking comment Monday.

The disappearing habitat threatens a delicate migratory route that has spanned two continents and a million square miles for some 10,000 years, Brower said

[The Instructor]

Great video....

[kantuckyII]

I wouldn't step near that place! They are even now coming into the US, grabbing victims, sneaking them back into Mexico and holding them for ransom!

Since Thanksgiving at least 18 U.S. residents have been kidnapped and held for ransom in and around Tijuana, according to Keith Slotter, the special agent in charge of the FBI's San Diego office. That averages out to about six per month. Late last month Mexican authorities rescued two female real estate agents—one a U.S. resident—who had been kidnapped on Jan. 19 and arrested three kidnappers, according to the FBI. The bureau would not talk specifically about the case or comment on whether the three men were suspects in any of the other abductions.

Some of the 18 recent kidnapping victims have been killed, while others have survived but suffered serious injuries, Slotter says. Kidnappers raped some of the female victims. The violence associated with the abductions "goes way beyond anything we've seen, in terms of brutality," he says. "We don't really know why."

[kantuckyII]

Oh, that was from an article in the News Week entitled: ‘I Will Never Return to Mexico’

another tid bit from the article

Two weeks ago residents found six bodies on the streets with signs attached to the corpses that warned against participating in a new Mexican Army program to encourage citizens to inform on drug traffickers

I fear for the butterfly there too!