Mexico vows to protect monarch butterfly

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Mexico will enforce a "zero tolerance" policy against logging that threatens to wipe out the monarch butterfly and will act to stop a rare and ancient oasis from drying up, President Felipe Calderon said on Saturday.

Calderon said soldiers will be deployed to clamp down on illegal logging in a protected forest where monarch butterflies winter after migrating thousands of miles from Canada and the United States.

"We will work intensively to establish a zero tolerance policy to illegal logging in the monarch zone," he told villagers in the region at the launch of a five-year conservation plan.

He said 10 million trees would be planted in the butterfly reserve, part of a goal to plant 250 million trees across Mexico in 2007.

Calderon said soldiers and federal police would patrol the zone looking for loggers, while the number of personnel in the zone and in other wildlife sanctuaries would increase by 15 percent.

Every autumn, millions of monarch butterflies leave Canada and the United States, flying distances of 2,800 miles (4,500 km) to the oyamel fir forests of Mexico's Sierra Madre Mountains.

Experts say the butterfly will become extinct unless illegal logging is stopped soon.

LIFE ON MARS

Calderon also promised to apply stricter controls on the extraction of water from a giant reservoir that sits beneath an ancient oasis in the Great Chihuahuan Desert.