As the monarch butterfly gets federal protection recommendation, Portland nonprofit receives grant to aid habitat restoration

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife is proposing federal protections and a threatened label for the Western monarch butterfly under the Endangered Species Act. The federal agency will be accepting public input until March 12. At the same time, a federal grant of $300,000 was awarded to the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation to aid in habitat restoration. The Portland nonprofit will be using the funds to continue offering free kits containing milkweed and wildflowers for community spaces and working, tribal and public lands in Oregon, Washington and California. Emma Pelton is a conservation biologist with the nonprofit. She joins us to share more on the impact this funding will have and what potential protections for the butterfly will mean going forward.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has proposed listing the Western monarch butterfly as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. The federal agency is accepting public input until March 12. Meanwhile, the Portland-based Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation was recently awarded a $300,000 grant to aid in monarch habitat restoration. Emma Pelton is a conservation biologist with the nonprofit. She joins us to talk about all this. It’s great to have you on Think Out Loud.

Emma Pelton: Thanks for having me.

Miller: I want to start just with the wondrousness of these insects. Where do you begin when you think about these amazing creatures?

Pelton: I think the imagination that the monarch migration really evokes in so many people is what connects me when I was a child with monarchs, and finding milkweed and monarchs in my backyard. And now as an adult, this is my full-time job, which feels a bit like a dream. I think so many people across North America have those childhood connections, remember seeing the butterflies arrive and then depart, depending on where you live and when they would arrive. But just that migration, and the fact that they appear and then disappear seasonally, I think is something that really connects people to this butterfly. And the fact that they make these long distance migrations to Central Mexico and coastal California really become this major source of ecotourism and connection to those places.

Miller: So there’s two different migrating populations. The Eastern one, which is apparently a lot bigger, has always been and now even maybe even more so than the Western one. What are the two different basic trips that these two populations do?

Pelton: We think of the Rocky Mountains as the dividing line. It’s a little bit porous, and we know there’s some interchange between the Eastern and the Western populations. But generally, Eastern monarchs are monarchs that were caterpillars and kind of grow up east of the Rocky Mountains. And over successive generations, they get all the way up to Southern Canada. And then in the fall – September, October – those butterflies throughout the eastern range start to make the trip down to Central Mexico, and relatively high elevation forests in Michoacán, a state of Mexico.

And then separately in the West, monarchs west of the Rocky Mountains in the fall, again spread up to Southern Canada, start to migrate to a really different area, which is the beach – coastal California. So we kind of have these very different strategies where they’re using high elevation mountains of Mexico, they’re using very low elevation forests in coastal California. And in coastal California, they’re actually spread out [over] a huge part of the Pacific coast. So, Mendocino County, Southern Redwoods, down into Northern Baja, Mexico. They’re in a lot more dispersed smaller groves.

And then each spring, no matter where they overwinter, on the coast or in Central Mexico, the butterflies who made it through the winter start the migration north again. So throughout this migratory cycle, most butterflies are just living a few weeks. But we call them the super generation that really lived for many months, and do this two-way migration south and west, and then back into the breeding grounds in the spring.

Miller: How long might an individual butterfly go over the course of their own migration?

Pelton: There are a lot of wide ranging estimates. I think upper bound, 2,000 to 3,000 miles if you look at the extremes. A lot of butterflies are going to travel much less than that, more like hundreds of miles. But I think no matter where they are in that extreme range, we’ve got butterflies traveling a really long distance.

Miller: When I think about migrating species, the first ones that come to mind are birds, and then I think maybe marine mammals like whales would follow. How common are migratory insects?

Pelton: They’re both common, and I think monarchs are really unique in terms of this two-way migration that I just talked about. A lot of butterflies and other insects might kind of expand their range in the summer, tracking resources like food. But not as many insects have this, where they come back in the fall and are actually going back to the same places where their ancestors’ journey began. So we see a lot of expansion migration. But this two-way migration, while not fully unique to monarchs, is more unique in the insect world.

Miller: That next generation taking up where their ancestors left off, maybe that gets to part of what you’re talking about at the beginning about the sort of permanent wonder of this for kids and adults. How much do we know now about how they navigate, how these winged insects, that have never been to the places that they’re going to, know where to go?

Pelton: This is still one of the great mysteries. There’s been more and more science trying to unravel how they navigate, [how] they end up where they end up. And so we do have a better picture of it. Sun angle, the Earth’s magnetic fields, even just the declining quality of the plants that they’re relying on as milkweed starts to die back later in the season – those are all factors. Temperature may be a factor. But exactly how they know to head to a place that their ancestors were, when there was no one to show them the way, is very unique … and very different than birds, when you think about the transfer of information and birds living multiple years and being able to travel together, and there’s some amount of learning that’s occurring. There’s really not any learning that’s possible when you have never done this journey before.

So exactly how we have butterflies end up sometimes even on the same branch of the same tree, at a grove that was occupied the year before, that piece of it is still one of the greatest mysteries.

Miller: How do you feel about mysteries as a conservation biologist?

Pelton: I love it. I think the deeper I’m in this work, the more I accept that there’s certain things that’s gonna take us a very long time to know, and we may never know. And I think that’s OK. I think we can walk with the knowledge that we have and continue to try to learn more to better conserve them, while also holding some space for wonder and mystery, and say “We don’t know exactly why they use this tree, but they keep using this tree. So this tree is something we need to protect.”

And that’s a lot of the work our team does, really focusing on helping people understand that certain parts of their migratory journey are really important, and we can’t replicate them. We don’t know how to make a new forest for them to use if we cut down this forest that they’ve been using for hundreds or possibly much longer amounts of time. Alternately, milkweed – they are very dynamic. And if milkweed pops up in one part of your yard and you need to remove it the next year and it’s gonna come up in another part of your yard, that’s OK. They’re very flexible with their breeding habitat. They’re not very flexible with the forest that they use.

Miller: It’s so interesting, there’s so many different ways to think about the not knowing. Because if their survival were not dependent on our ability to understand what makes them thrive or live, then there’s something beautiful about not knowing. But if we are changing the world and their habitats in such dramatic ways that they’re dying out, then it’s harder to justify embracing the mystery, if it’s preventing us from making it so they don’t disappear from our planet.

Pelton: Yeah, absolutely. We’ve been talking with a lot of other like-minded colleagues for quite a while about specifically overwintering and how little we know about that part of their cycle. And we have a few different active research projects to try to better understand forest structure. Are there components that we can kind of better capture, so we could have land managers improve a forest, maybe create habitat in the future? Currently, we have very limited ability to create new habitat because we don’t understand exactly what they’re looking for. That’s very much driving some of the science that we’re currently working on, and others are working on.

I think, until we know more, this is where we have to do both. We have to say there’s mystery right now, so we better hold on to what we know they use. And let’s try to understand it so that in the future, we can continue to make new habitat, and replace habitat that’s lost.

Miller: What are the best estimates right now for monarch butterfly populations for these two populations?

Pelton: There’s a lot of different estimates out there, and particularly in Mexico, because the monarchs cluster so high in the trees and they’re so densely covering the trees, it’s very hard to get an estimate of the exact number of individuals. But there are some really good estimates out there that just talk about the millions of butterflies that are found in Mexico. So that’s a little more of a ballpark figure.

The big picture is that we have fewer and fewer butterflies overwintering each year on average, in Mexico and in California. And in Mexico, the Eastern migration we estimate has undergone about an 80% decline since the late ‘90s. For every five butterflies that were there in the ‘90s, we just have one today, on average.

And in the West, it’s actually a more severe decline. It’s always been a smaller migration, but it’s declined more rapidly and more severely. And what’s unique about the Western estimates is we actually can count individuals in many cases. Sometimes we still estimate, but in general, we do a lot of actual counting. We have a project called the Western Monarch Count that was started by some great scientists back in the late ‘90s. And now we rely on up to 400 volunteers and partners because they are spread out over such a huge range of California and Northern Baja. My colleague Isis Howard, who’s down in California, really coordinates this, and it’s a huge effort. We get people out during standard counting periods, and based on that data and that community science effort, we estimate that the population has declined over 95% since the 1980s. So a more severe decline.

And this year, for example, we’re just wrapping up one of our official count periods. And we estimate there were less than 10,000 butterflies. And we know back in the ‘90s, we had over a million butterflies. So just the scale of that decline has been really shocking. It’s very different to go to a site and count 500 butterflies, when you know a year or two ago there were 5,000 butterflies.

Miller: If, given that the Western population has gone down 95% in just 40 years, and maybe more, why aren’t monarchs already protected under the Endangered Species Act?

Pelton: That’s a good question. The petition to consider them for listing happened 10 years ago. And at that time, we weren’t fully understanding the scale of the decline in either population. But since that petition has gone on, if anything, the situation has gotten more dire. So absolutely, it’s high time that they received protections, and we’re really thrilled that the service has proposed them for threatened status.

So there’s still a long road ahead. This is, in some ways, just the beginning. This isn’t a final rule. But we do hope this is a really big step forward because we are anticipating the second lowest numbers ever in Mexico this year. We haven’t gotten the final announcement yet, but it sounds like it’s going to be pretty low. And then in the West, we are also anticipating this is going to be our second lowest count ever.

Miller: We talked around this a little bit, but just to focus in on it, what are the various reasons for these huge declines?

Pelton: There are probably quite a few reasons that are interacting, and we can kind of lump them into three categories. One of them is habitat loss. The milkweed plants that the caterpillars rely on have been largely removed from agricultural fields back in the ‘90s, as we started to adapt more genetically modified crops, where farmers could spray herbicides and remove milkweed from their fields. I don’t think anyone wants milkweed to come back into farm fields, which as its name implies, is a weed. But we do need to find ways to compensate for the fact that we’ve lost a lot of milkweed. And we’ve also lost a lot of milkweed because of land use. As humans take up more space for housing and development, we’re also losing natural areas. And that’s a really shared problem with a lot of other butterflies, not just monarchs. So absolutely getting more milkweed, more flowering plants in the landscape is really key.

But we also know we’ve lost overwintering habitat in California. There’s still no meaningful legal protection, so we continue to see forest cut on private and public lands, unfortunately, every year, and those are largely irreplaceable at this point. So that’s a more acute issue.

Beyond habitat, pesticides, including systemic insecticides, which are now found in a lot of seed coatings and are kind of prophylactically used in a lot of our cropping systems, as well as spraying that occurs throughout the season is strongly linked with insect declines, and monarchs specifically.

And then climate change has made the picture more difficult and I think will be a bigger threat moving forward. So we know we need to tackle that for lots of reasons. But also, the ways that we can help monarchs – getting more habitat on the ground, thinking about reducing the overuse of pesticides – are some ways we can really tangibly create more resiliency, so that as the climate is warmer and hotter, they can adapt. These are really resilient animals that have multiple generations. So we do think they have capacity if we take actions now, that we could see recovery. I think there’s still a lot of hope that this could turn around if we make the right moves.

Miller: What would the proposed listing of these butterflies as threatened under the Endangered Species Act mean in terms of actual protections for these insects?

Pelton: I think this is a really unique listing because monarchs and their host plant are found in all of the lower 48 states and Hawaii – although Hawaii was exempted, which I think is OK because it is not a native butterfly there. So it’s really unique, and I think the only thing that comes close is maybe the listing of the bald eagle.

The Service wrote a really complicated and I think really great proposal which helped balance how they’re going to handle all this. Exactly how it will play out in reality is still something we’re not quite sure what this will look like. The initial impressions are that some of the big improvements would be there’d be more protection for some of those overwintering sites in California, at least for a portion of them. Some of the biggest sites are proposed to be protected through critical habitat, which will help maintain forests on the landscape. I think it’s also going to create a lot more incentives for agencies to come to the table. We know we had a lot of voluntary effort, people are doing a lot of great work, putting habitat in the gardens, on their farms. But we really need to scale it up. And so having federal agencies be obligated to consider and think about monarchs, managing for monarchs, I think we’ll create a lot more incentives for there to be habitat on the ground.

And then we also hope this is really gonna help us think about widespread use of insecticides. The Service has kind of asked for public comment on how they should handle pesticides. So we don’t know what those protections, if any, will look like. But I think that’s one area we’d like to see there’d be some movement, so that we maybe avoid the most problematic elements of pesticide overreliance.

Miller: I mentioned that your organization got a $300,000 federal grant recently, to work in part on habitat restoration for monarchs. What can people listening do if they care about monarch butterflies?

Pelton: One big thing is you can look at our grant, and we’re really thrilled to receive this funding to expand our habitat kit program, which has become really popular. This funding will help support our program in California, Western Oregon and Eastern Washington. So if you live in any of those places and are interested, you can get 100 or more free native plants – often milkweed is included. And that program has provided over a quarter of a million plants in the last six years. So we’re really trying to lower barriers for people to know what the right plant is, get complementary plants that are gonna work well together. We use native plant nurseries that aren’t using problematic pesticides, those are pollinator-friendly plants when you plant them.

So if you have a farm, a ranch, tribal lands, community gardens, city parks, school gardens – those are all qualifying projects. So you can check out our website. And a lot of those application periods open in February or so, some of them a little bit earlier, some a little later, depending on the geography. But that’s a really great opportunity where you can get a lot of free native plants, which we think are a really key part of the solution.

I think beyond that, other great ways for people to engage are to really think about being a conscious consumer if you’re able to. So finding ways to purchase food from farmers that think about wildlife habitat, using an integrated pest management program or certified organic are great ways people can help in kind of an indirect way.

And then another thing I’d like to bring up is community science. So if you ever see a monarch or a milkweed, or frankly any cool butterfly or bee, there are so many wonderful community science projects. And one that we really like to bring up for Oregon is the Western Monarch Milkweed Mapper, which is a project that was a partnership between the state of Idaho, the state of Washington, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Xerces. We now continue the project. And we have a project in iNaturalist. It helps researchers, if you snap a picture of a monarch or a milkweed, we really get to see that and it helps us track the migration, understand what habitat types they’re using, and it’s actively been used in multiple publications to understand the most important areas for monarchs.

So the community science efforts really matter, and are a really great way for people to just start to see their landscape, pay attention, notice where there’s milkweed in the places they frequent, and start to look for monarchs. And if they don’t find monarchs, find all the other cool bugs and birds that are utilizing milkweed and other monarch habitat plants.

Miller: Emma Pelton, thanks very much.

Pelton: Thanks for having me.

Miller: Emma Pelton is a conservation biologist at the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation.

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