News of the week
Monarch butterflies are making their way back
The news has been dire for the western monarch butterfly for the past couple of years, with the of loss of the population estimated at 99 percent or more.
There are two populations of monarch butterflies in North America, the eastern and western, which are separated by the Rocky Mountains. Both populations are migratory. Eastern monarchs can be found from Texas to New England during the warmer months of the year. They migrate and overwinter in pine forests in Mexico. Amazingly, their southern migration includes a route that has them flying through Florida and over the waters of the Gulf of Mexico.
The western monarch, the one that has had such a great decline in population, has a migration that is not as dramatic. These butterflies live throughout the West and overwinter in California.
The eastern monarchs are having their trouble, too. Climate change, habitat loss, pesticides, and the use of glyphosate, a weed killer that destroys milkweed, the host plant of the monarch caterpillar, seem to be the culprits.
Despite the bad news about the western monarchs, I’ve been seeing more of these butterflies in the last few months. I work, at least part-time, as a gardener at a very small zoo that is situated in the middle of a wildlife refuge. The Living Coast Discovery Center (LCDC) occupies about three and a half acres of an island that skirts the boundary between marshland and the waters of San Diego Bay. (For comparison, the San Diego Zoo, ten miles to the north of the LCDC, is over 100 acres.)
As the LCDC gardener, I’m outside most of the day. It has its rewards. I see A LOT of migrating birds. I also see butterflies and caterpillars aplenty. Among the plants that I plant in the ground and tend is narrow leaf milkweed (Asclepias fascicularis), the native milkweed found throughout most of California, and one of the many species of milkweed on which monarch butterflies lay their eggs and on which the monarch caterpillars feed.
Last year, 2020, is sort of lost in a COVID fog, and there were long stretches of time when I was not at the LCDC, but in 2019, I don’t recall seeing many monarchs around the Center. The official count of the monarchs was only 1,914 in 2019. The population of the monarchs had been estimated in the hundreds of thousands in the 1970s.
This year, although I had read that the population of the monarchs was almost nil, I’ve been seeing monarchs for months, not a whole bunch, but way more than I’d seen a couple years ago. They are most definitely monarch butterflies, as they are the ones that hover around and alight to the milkweed that I have planted.
Turns out other folks have been seeing more monarchs, too. According to the Xerxes Society, western monarchs are being seen here in California, with hundreds and sometimes thousands being spotted at some of their overwintering sites. The official count won’t be until the annual Thanksgiving Count, which begins on November 13th, but some recent observations are promising. At their Pacific Grove overwintering site, not a single monarch was found last year, yet over 1,300 of the butterflies were counted on October 16th this year. About 8,000 monarchs were estimated at Pismo State Beach Monarch Butterfly Grove on October 20th. Only 300 showed up there last year.
It would have seemed like the western monarch was about to go into a death spiral towards extinction, but for those of us dedicated to ensuring that the natural world lives on, I think this gives us a good lesson to never give up, to keep up the good fight. I’ll keep planting milkweed, and I’ll keep expecting to see the western monarch return next October. (Xerxes Society)
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This is really lovely to hear.