Monarch Population in California Spirals to Another Record Low

Monarch Population in California Spirals to Another Record Low By Emma Pelton on 30 November 2020 Early count numbers from Xerces’ Western Monarch Thanksgiving Count suggest that the western migratory population is headed for an all-time low. With roughly 30% of the data in—including from some of the largest sites—only 1,224 monarchs have been reported. If this early data reflects monitoring at the rest of the sites, we may see fewer than 10,000 monarchs overwintering in California this year. This is a significant decline from the low numbers of the last two years where the total hovered just under 30,000 monarchs. These numbers are a tiny fraction of the millions of monarchs that likely visited overwintering sites in the 1980s and the hundreds of thousands of monarchs that graced California’s coast as recently as the mid-2010s. Continue reading this blog post here. Read the press release associated with this blog here.