Monarch Butterfly Recovery: A North Bay Monarch Working Group Update
The Monarch butterfly is beautiful and easily recognizable. But why is it so iconic? Monarchs serve as a pollinator that supports our food system, is a culturally important symbol, and is simply a beautiful and exciting thing to encounter. Monarch populations have also plummeted in recent years, bringing a new focus to Monarch conservation efforts. For the past two years, the Gold Ridge RCD has joined monarch recovery efforts through a collaboration with a wide array of partners including the Laguna de Santa Rosa Foundation, Conservation Works, Sonoma County School Garden Network, Point Blue Conservation Science’s STRAW Program, Salmon Protection and Watershed Network, UC Marin Master Gardeners, and many others. This North Bay Monarch Working Group, created in 2021, aims to promote pollinator habitat through seed collection, propagation, and planting of diverse habitat on public and working lands throughout the North Bay. Plantings include several native milkweed species, the only plant upon which the monarch lays its eggs.
How are we doing now? Since the project’s onset, nearly 8,000 starts of narrowleaf milkweed (Asclepias fascicularis) have been propagated from locally collected seed sources, an effort spearheaded by Ayla Mills, Nursery Manager at the Laguna Foundation. Thus far, nearly 6,500 have been provided to native habitat plantings at over 170 sites, including school and community gardens, wildlands restoration efforts, public parks, and local farms. An additional 1,500 will be planted this spring.
This conservation initiative allows for widespread participation, because unlike recovery efforts for other imperiled species like coho salmon, where populations are confined to select streams, monarch habitat can be established almost anywhere, even in small spaces. Milkweed itself, as an herbaceous perennial that dies back in the fall, requires little attention, and can spread itself both through rhizomes and seed, meaning even a few plants can ultimately provide breeding habitat to support caterpillars. Even potted flowering balcony plants or small flower gardens are able to provide critical nectar sources to support the butterflies’ migration. This means that apartment dwellers and schoolchildren in urban environments can participate in monarch recovery and citizen science monitoring of monarch recovery, in addition to farmers, ranchers, and other large landowners.
Gold Ridge RCD’s GrizzlyCorps Fellow, Nina Adarkar, is focusing on monarch recovery and education during her 2023–24 fellowship. Nina helped Ayla collect thousands of native narrowleaf milkweed seeds this fall. Around 2,000 will be saved to sow more plants at the nursery this spring, and 13,000 seeds will be sent to Heritage Growers for seed amplification, in a statewide effort to provide more regionally appropriate native seed stock, funded through the Wildlife Conservation Board. Seed amplification will produce hundreds of thousands of additional seeds with diverse genetics, to be returned to the different collection regions for distribution to native plant nurseries or incorporation into seed mixes. The milkweed seeds collected for the amplification efforts came from multiple sites, including the Earle Baum Center for the Blind & Visually Impaired. The Earle Baum Center, besides providing fantastic resources for people living with sight loss and their families, is home to vernal pools and a substantial wild patch of narrowleaf milkweed.
Part of Nina’s Monarch recovery work is to monitor and assess all of the school gardens that planted pollinator habitat through the Sonoma County School Garden Network’s Schoolyard Habitat Program over the past decade. Here are a few photos of a few of the pollinator habitat grants, and the happy monarchs spotted by teachers and students.
These efforts couldn’t come at a more crucial time. The Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation recently released numbers from the 2023 Thanksgiving Western Monarch Count, reporting 233,394 butterflies across 256 of California’s coastal overwintering sites. While this is less than 5% of the 1980s overwintering population, these numbers represent a hopeful recovery from 2020’s record low count of less than 1,900. Though it’s promising to see a growing number of volunteers and monitored sites, there is much more work to be done to ensure the monarch population’s recovery to its historic levels, numbering in the millions.
A highlight of the Monarch recovery work has been working with a wide variety of partner organizations, garden teachers, interested students, and engaged community members that are all committed to restoring our western Monarch population, one habitat patch at a time.
Article link: https://medium.com/resource-conservation-network/monarch-butterfly-recovery-e6a49093000c
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