Museum sees thousands more monarchs this year
By Alani Letang
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PACIFIC GROVE, California (KSBW) — The Pacific Grove Museum of Natural History is doing its annual monarch butterfly count. They are seeing thousands more than last year.
“So the importance of counting is to understand one what’s happening with the population overall,” said Stephanie Turcotte-Edenholl, the educational volunteer at the Pacific Grove Museum of Natural History.
Every year western monarchs are counted across the Western U.S. The Pacific Grove Museum of Natural History counts the monarchs at the Butterfly Monarch Sanctuary, behind the Butterfly Grove Inn in Pacific Grove. On Thursday, Oct. 29th, the museum counted 9,544 monarchs. In 2020, the sanctuary saw zero monarchs.
“That tells us we have really destroyed their habitat. We have done over the decades some horrible things,” said Dixie Layne, the president with Friends of The Monarchs.
“These really low dips that we’ve had in the last few years are the concern,” Turcotte-Edenholl said. “So the fact that we already have an estimated 30,000 for the whole population this year, when last year it was 19-hundred for the whole western population. That’s really good, but what’s going to happen next year?”
The museum started counting butterflies in mid-October. The counting is done weekly. They start early in the morning and work in teams of two people. First, the teams have to find where in the sanctuary they see the monarchs.
“So then we look at a particular tree. We agree wherein the tree we’re going to count. And then we slowly begin using binoculars,” said Turcotte-Edenholl. “We look at a cluster and you visualize a group of 10 or 20 monarchs and then you extrapolate it over the entire area of the branch. So it’s a formulated, systematic scientific estimate.”
The counting teams’ numbers have to be within 15% to 20% of each other, then they take the average of that number. The butterflies in Pacific Grove migrate from Washington, Oregon and even Arizona.
They come to Pacific Grove for the winter because the temperature is not too hot or too cold. There is also nectar for them to feed on, along with trees like pines and cypress they can move up and down depending on the weather.
Educators say climate change, pesticides, and wildfires that wipe out Monarchs survival plants, can impact monarchs’ migration.
But there is still hope, such as replanting nectar plans or milkweed, which monarchs need.
“So we have to understand that we individually we can’t do anything, but together we can. We can change the planet. It’s not too late to bring them back in the right numbers,” Layne said.
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