An Iconic Migration Is In Trouble—Join Us To Help Save Western Monarchs!
We are fighting to save Western monarchs. Join us in this crucial conservation effort.
February, 2024 | Source: Xerces
Once, millions of monarchs overwintered annually along the Pacific coast in California and Baja, Mexico. But by the mid-2010s, the population had declined to hundreds of thousands of butterflies, a >90% decline from the 1980s. In the winters between 2018-2020, the annual Xerces Western Monarch Thanksgiving Count tallied under 30,000 monarchs—record low counts. In 2021 and 2022, the population made a modest bounce back to mid-2010s numbers with a count of >200,000. However, the population still remains perilously small and vulnerable to yearly fluctuations.
While the yearly up-and-downs of the population garners a lot of attention, the real issue is the longer-term population decline due to stressors such as habitat loss and degradation, pesticides, and climate change—as well as other pressures on the migratory cycle of the monarch that we still have yet to fully study or comprehend. There are no quick fixes to solve all these large and complex forces, but we can all take actions–both big and small–to help save monarchs as well as the many other butterfly and bee species that need our help.
This Western Monarch Call to Action, led by the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation, aims to provide a set of rapid-response conservation actions that, if applied immediately, can help the western monarch population bounce back from its critically low overwintering size. We recognize and support longer-term recovery efforts in place for western monarchs such as the Western Association of Fish & Wildlife Agencies (WAFWA) plan and Monarch Joint Venture (MJV) implementation plan. The goal of this call to action, however, is to identify actions that can be implemented in the short-term, to avoid a total collapse of the western monarch migration and set the stage for longer-term efforts to have time to start making a difference.