© Daniel Terdiman/CNETClusters of monarch butterflies in coastal California locations like Santa Cruz may become rarer and rarer as loss of habitat and essential plants threaten the majestic species.
Santa Cruz, California.--When I lived in this beach town on the central California coast in the early 1990s, I loved visiting a stunning local state park where each winter you could find more than 120,000 monarch butterflies swarming, clustering, and flying everywhere you looked.
It was an awesome sight.
Today, a visit to the monarch grove at Natural Bridges State Beach reveals a much grimmer situation--just 2,000 monarchs during the peak of their "overwintering" season, the period from late October through early March when the colorful butterflies rest in the trees here, protected from the cold, rain, and wind, waiting for mating season in the early spring.
And the same bleak picture is being painted in nearby Pacific Grove, California., a tiny town adjacent to Monterey that is known as "Butterfly Town, USA," Where once many tens of thousands of monarchs would spend each winter, there are now less than 5,000. And that's up a tick from last year.
"The big picture is that the monarch populations have precipitously dropped since the 1970s, '80s, and '90s," said Mia Monroe, a monarch expert with the international insect conservation group, The Xerces Society. "And needless to say, we're all worried and concerned and are asking why."
What's happened during the last 15 or so years then is nothing short of a crisis for these beautiful creatures. The rapid depletion of the annual coastal monarch population is a direct reflection, experts say, of the impact of humans on nature. Monarchs must lay their eggs on the milkweed plant, which is gradually disappearing in crucial parts of California as housing subdivisions replace the orchards, meadows, and vacant lots where the plant once proliferated, and as more efficient farming methods have allowed people to grow crops at the margins of their properties, places where milkweed used to thrive.
