Please read the email from Matthew Shepherd of the Xerces Society (xerces.org). I'm alarmed and wanted to share the content immediately.
Gretchen
The Queen Bee
"Surveys done by volunteers with the Western Monarch Thanksgiving Count found only 28,429 butterflies, an 86% fall from the previous year—and a 99.4% decline from the number of monarchs in the state in the 1980s. To put this in perspective, for every 160 monarchs in the 80s, there is only one now, the rough equivalent of the city of Los Angeles shrinking to the town of Monterey.
Faced with these alarming numbers, the Xerces Society has worked with monarch scientists at institutions across the western states to develop the Western Monarch Call to Action, a 5-point rapid-response action plan to rescue the western population of the monarch butterfly.
We have also released today a fact sheet on what individuals can do to help as well as the final count data for the Thanksgiving 2018 count. All of this can be found at savewesternmonarchs.org
The Xerces Society is taking action for monarchs across the United States, with a special focus on restoring breeding and overwintering habitat for the western population in California.
-- We are pushing for protection for overwintering sites and working with partners to restore habitat at multiple overwintering sites.
-- Working with farmers, natural area managers, California cities, and others, we are planting and restoring habitat across the Central Valley—a key breeding and migration area for monarchs. In the last 18 months, we have restored 20 miles of hedgerows on farms, and in the coming year, we will be adding another 10 miles to further re-connect habitats. These hedgerows provide essential nectar sources, milkweed for breeding, and an unsprayed refuge in a largely inhospitable landscape.
-- Recognizing the challenges of creating habitat for monarchs, Xerces staff are working with the USDA-Natural Resources Conservation Service Plant Materials Center in California to conduct planting trials of milkweed and monarch nectar plants to develop best practices for establishing these plants in the state.
If you live in California or another western state, we urge you to join us in recovering the western monarch population.
(It should be noted that the eastern population is doing better than the western monarchs. Overall, eastern monarch have suffered a significant long-term decline (ca. 85%) in a couple of decades, but it hasn’t experienced the abrupt and dizzying fall that afflicted the western population. That said, if you are in the eastern regions, please do everything you can to help monarchs have adequate, safe habitat!)
The most immediate priority in the coming weeks is to ensure monarchs have nectar to fuel their flight and milkweeds on which they can lay their eggs when they leave the overwintering sites. This is something that everyone in California can help with right now: plant early blooming native flowers and milkweed to restore breeding and migratory habitat. Monarchs will use plants growing in gardens, parks, along railroads, on farms and anywhere else they can find them.
Of equal importance to ensuring monarchs have flowers is protecting their overwintering sites. Each year, the groves they shelter in are destroyed or damaged by development or inappropriate tree trimming. This needs to be halted and the groves given adequate protection and management, so that monarchs have a place to return to next fall.
There are important questions that remain unanswered about monarchs, such as a detailed understanding of where they go right after they leave the overwintering sites. People can watch out for monarchs and report what they see to the online Western Monarch Milkweed Mapper project to help inform conservation strategies."