[Pollinator] Monarch population in California spiraling to another record low

[Matthew Shepherd]

We were hoping for better news to share about the state of the monarch
population gathered in California to overwinter, but the early numbers from
the Western Monarch Thanksgiving Count don’t paint a good picture. With 74
sites reported -- over 30% of the anticipated data -- only 1,224 monarchs
have been counted. If this 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.



For more information, read our blog:

https://xerces.org/blog/monarch-population-in-california-spirals-to-another-record-low



Of course, this doesn’t give any indication of the state of the eastern
monarchs that overwinter in Mexico. We won’t know how well that population
is doing until WWF-Mexico releases data early next year.



Matthew





----------

Matthew Shepherd

Director of Communications & Outreach

*he/him/his*



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