Sometime in the next three weeks, the first monarchs will start showing up in the eucalyptus and pine at the corner of Ridge Road and Lighthouse Avenue. Anyone who has lived in Pacific Grove for more than a season knows the rhythm: the butterflies arrive, the docents set up their spotting scopes, and by Thanksgiving the trees either look like they're covered in dead leaves that move, or they don't.
What residents also hear, every winter, is a parallel story that has almost nothing to do with what happens on Ridge Road. It's the story of a species in crisis: record lows, a proposed federal listing, headlines about a 95 percent population collapse since the 1980s. That story is true. It is also, for anyone trying to figure out whether this is a year worth walking down to the sanctuary, close to useless. The number that gets reported in January is not the number that determines what you'll see in your own neighborhood grove this fall, and the gap between those two numbers is wide enough to change how you think about the whole tradition.
The number in the headline versus the number in the grove
The Xerces Society's Western Monarch Count, the official tally that produces those January headlines, is a statewide survey across roughly 249 sites. The most recent count, taken during the typical peak overwintering window from late November through early December 2025, recorded approximately 12,260 monarchs, the third lowest total since the count began in 1997. The all time low was 1,901, recorded in 2020.
Pacific Grove's own sanctuary has never moved in step with those statewide swings. Following a complete absence of monarchs at the site in 2020, the same year the statewide count hit its historic low, the sanctuary rebounded to 12,364 individuals by the 2021 Thanksgiving Count. The next year it climbed to 15,960, the highest tally the site had seen since 2016. Then, in November 2023, the official count at the sanctuary dropped to 6,608, even as the statewide total that same season reached 233,394 monarchs across more than 100 sites, one of the healthier years on record statewide. By the 2024-25 season, the sanctuary had fallen to 228 butterflies while the statewide count sat at 9,119.
| Winter Season | Pacific Grove Sanctuary Count | Statewide Total (Xerces Western Monarch Count) |
|---|---|---|
| 2020 | Complete absence | 1,901 (all-time low) |
| 2021 | 12,364 | not separately reported |
| 2022 | 15,960 (highest since 2016) | not separately reported |
| 2023 | 6,608 | 233,394 across 100+ sites |
| 2024 | 228 | 9,119 |
| 2025* | 63 (early-season tally, Oct 30) | 12,260 across 249 sites |
*The 2025 figure comes from the early-season survey window, not the full Thanksgiving Count peak that produced the other numbers in this table, so it is not a direct apples to apples comparison with prior years. It is the most recent local data point available before this fall's arrivals.
Read across that table and the pattern is not a slow decline. It's noise. A local high during a statewide low. A local low during a statewide high. Whatever determines the count at this specific eight-acre grove in a given year, it is not primarily the same force driving the multi-decade statewide trend that makes the news.
Why the same trees swing from zero to sixteen thousand
The city's own annual assessment reports, prepared by conservation biologist Stuart Weiss of Creekside Science under a management plan that dates to 2011, point to something much more local than climate trend lines: wind.
The 2023 assessment noted that a shelterbelt of eucalyptus and other species planted in 1999 has matured to the point that it now provides reliable northwest wind protection, meaning monarchs can hold their position in the sanctuary's interior zone even when wind shifts, a pattern also observed in 2017 and other years. The same report described how the depth of the grove lets monarchs retreat to the far northern interior section during strong southerly storms, a detail that only matters if you already know the grove has sections with different wind exposure in the first place.
None of that is visible from the entrance sign. It's the accumulated result of decades of specific, small interventions: hazard trees removed as they die, toyon and ceanothus planted and caged to establish new nectar sources, irrigation scheduling adjusted year over year. The 2023 report's own conclusion was that the sanctuary continues to provide high quality overwintering habitat, full stop, independent of what the statewide count says that same winter. A site that has been engineered for wind shelter for a quarter century does not rise and fall with a population trend the way an unmanaged grove would.
A $1,000 fine that predates the federal debate by seventy years
While the population conversation plays out at the federal level, it is worth knowing exactly where that conversation stands and how it relates, or doesn't, to what already protects the butterflies here.
In December 2024, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed listing the monarch butterfly as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act, along with 4,395 acres of proposed critical habitat spanning seven California counties including Monterey. The public comment period, reopened for an additional 60 days in the spring, closed on May 19, 2025. As of the most recent information available, no final rule has been issued. Whatever happens in Washington, it has not yet changed anything on the ground in Pacific Grove.
That's partly because Pacific Grove never waited for Washington. A municipal ordinance on the books since 1952 already makes it unlawful for any person to "molest or interfere" with the butterflies during their annual visit, enforced by the Pacific Grove Police Department with a fine of up to $1,000. The sanctuary itself exists because Pacific Grove voters approved a dedicated tax in 1990, known as Measure G, specifically to fund the site's creation and upkeep. Local advocates, including a nature group leader named Ro Vaccaro, pushed back against development plans for the land decades before the property, once owned by Del Monte Hotel Management and later home to the still-operating Butterfly Grove Inn, became protected ground. The federal government is still deciding what to do. Pacific Grove decided in 1952.
"The population's size is extremely concerning." — Emma Pelton, Xerces Society
That quote, from the biologist who has tracked the statewide numbers for years, is about the species overall. It is not a prediction about what any one resident will see on a walk down Ridge Road this November, which is exactly the distinction worth holding onto.
What actually decides whether you see them this month
If the statewide count and the ordinance history do not tell you what to expect, here is what does.
- The sanctuary sits at 250 Ridge Road, an open, ADA accessible gravel path with a slight downhill grade, free and open sunrise to sunset with no reservation required.
- Volunteer docents from the Pacific Grove Museum of Natural History are typically on site through the midday hours, roughly 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., and finding a docent on duty is the single best predictor of actually spotting a cluster, since they know which tree the butterflies chose that particular day.
- Monarchs are cold blooded. Below about 55 degrees they cluster tightly, looking like small pinecones or dead leaves. Above 55, they take flight, which is a better show but a harder count.
- The city holds public walk throughs of the grove most years, where residents can hear directly from the biologist managing the site about what changed since the last assessment, rather than waiting for a January headline to explain it after the fact.
The butterflies that show up in the next few weeks will settle into whichever corner of the grove is out of the wind that particular season, the same mechanism that has produced a table full of numbers with no discernible trend line. Whether this turns into a 16,000 year or a 228 year will say far more about tree health and wind direction in one specific grove than about the fate of a species across a continent. That's worth knowing before you read the next headline.
Pacific Grove's rhythms, the fog, the monarchs, the walkable blocks between Lighthouse Avenue and the shoreline, are part of what makes this stretch of the Peninsula worth paying attention to, whether you're watching butterflies settle in for the winter or just watching the neighborhood change around you. If you're weighing what's next for a home here, Ryan Sherman Luxury Real Estate has spent years reading both kinds of local signals. Schedule a private consultation when you're ready to talk about it.
