Monarch Population in California Spirals to Another Record Low By Emma Pelton on 30 November 2020
Emma Pelton
[Editor s note: This blog was revised on Friday, 12/11/20, to update the population estimates with new count data.]
Early count numbers from Xerces’ Western Monarch Thanksgiving Count suggest that the western migratory population is headed for an all-time low. With approximately 95% of the data in, only 1,800 monarchs have been reported. We anticipate a final total of less than 2,000 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. In fact, this represents an overall decline of more than