Did devastating storm doom a monarch butterfly habitat? SLO County town works to restore
Surveying the damage done, it was unlike anything Kitty Connolly had seen before.
“It looked like a hurricane had come through,” Connolly told The Tribune in December, recounting what she saw when she walked through the densely forested area of the Fiscalini Ranch Preserve nestled along Cambria’s picturesque coastline in February.
At the time, hundreds of native Monterey pine trees lay snapped in half along the forest floor, the canopy overhead now sparse and scattered.
When a devastating late January rainstorm hit San Luis Obispo County, it pummeled Cambria hardest.
Homes flooded, streets became impassable, trickling streams overflowed into roaring rivers and hillsides gave way to mudflows as more than a foot of rain was dumped on the North Coast within two days. On Jan. 29, Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency for San Luis Obispo and Monterey counties due to the destructive storm.
And the storm showed no mercy for the pristine and highly-cherished, 437-acre Fiscalini Ranch Preserve.
Connolly, the executive director for the Friends of the Fiscalini Ranch Preserve, the non-profit organization that maintains and protects the property, said the forest was silent after the storm. The jays, woodpeckers and owls seemed to have abandoned the preserve as their homes were wiped out.
Perhaps most troubling, however, was the pine forest that had once housed a dwindling number of overwintering western monarch butterflies — a key pollinator species that has seen a sharp decline in population in recent years.
In 2020, the preserve saw just eight of the orange-and-black striped insects, down from about 20,000 counted in 2015 — but had the storm’s pillage of the forest’s protective pines doomed the species this year?
Volunteers ‘shocked’ by destruction at preserve after storm
When Carlos Mendoza, facilities and resources manager for the Cambria Community Services District, the local governing agency that owns the Fiscalini Ranch Preserve property, was able to first look over the damage the storm did to the forest, the possible demise of the monarchs wasn’t the first alarming thought that crossed his mind.
Instead, he saw the hundreds of trees strewn across the forest floor, many of which were dead, as kindling basically begging to be lit aflame. And his gaze quickly shifted to the tightly-packed homes of the town he grew up in neighboring the preserve.
“We had to eliminate those fuel loads as soon as possible,” Mendoza said. “That was an obvious priority.”
But before calling in heavy equipment to chop and chip the fallen trees away, Mendoza and Connolly put their heads together to try to devise the best course of action that would heed the Friends of the Fiscalini Ranch Preserve’s mission: “to protect and sustain the diversity of life and the beauty of the Fiscalini Ranch Preserve for everyone.”
Understanding that the monarch butterflies are part of that “diversity of life” at the preserve and are incredibly sensitive to changes in their overwintering habitats, the two asked for help from the highly-regarded Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation to guide how they would proceed with the necessary tree work.
Enter Jessica Griffiths, an independent contractor with the national non-profit organization who has roughly 20 years of experience working with monarchs.
“I had been to Fiscalini Ranch before, but had not been since this big storm,” Griffiths said. “And I was really shocked at how many trees had been knocked down and how many dead trees there were.”
It made sense, Griffiths said, that the community services district and San Luis Obispo County Community Fire Safe Council wanted all of those trees out of the forest — the fire danger was clear.
But fresh in Griffiths’ mind was the startlingly-low monarch population counts from 2020.
California monarch butterfly numbers dwindle as overwintering sites destroyed
Fewer than 2,000 butterflies were counted in the state, down from nearly 300,000 in 2016 and 1.2 million in 1997, according to the Xerces Society’s annual count.
One likely factor of the monarch’s decline is the degradation of the insect’s overwintering sites throughout California. Although many are now protected from development, they still need further protection and restoration, according to the Xerces Society.
These pine tree forests or eucalyptus groves are special realms near important food sources with just the right microclimates for the sensitive monarchs. The wrong tree gets cut down and the whole system could be off — thus forcing the monarchs to fly longer distances perhaps farther from food sources to find their overwintering habitat.
“Monarch butterflies are like Goldilocks. It has to be just right,” Griffiths said. “That means it has to be the right temperature, the right wind speed, the right amount of humidity, the right amount of sunlight. If any of those things are out of whack, it won’t be suitable for them.”
The area that had been destroyed by the January storm wasn’t the most ideal overwintering habitat for the monarchs in the area, even before the storm.
Called the “ravine area,” it marks the edge of the Fiscalini Ranch Preserve’s Monterey pine forest and the start of an expansive grassland area before steep cliffs dive into the Pacific ocean.
Another area further inland and better protected from the prevailing southwesterly winds, the “pine flats area,” typically houses most, if not all, of the monarchs during the Cambria winter.
“But that doesn’t mean monarchs couldn’t come back to the (ravine) site,” Griffiths said. “So, because of that, we want to make sure that we’re protecting that overwintering site.”
It took crews four days in September to chop and chip the roughly 200 fallen or teetering pine trees by hand from the ravine area. Creating a mulch out of the trees — instead of removing them from the area — was important to Connolly because it ensured the trees would replenish the forest’s nutrients as they decayed where they had once stood.
The work was carefully guided by Griffiths, who pointed out which trees could provide valuable wind protection for the monarchs if left standing, and the San Luis Obispo County Community Fire Safe Council, which was particularly concerned for the wildfire risk should any dead trees remain.
“It was a balancing act between public safety and the monarch’s habitat needs,” Griffiths said.
All told, the work cost the Cambria Community Services District more than $100,000, Mendoza said.
The cost was necessary, however, to preserve the important monarch habitat and provide safety to Cambria residents, Mendoza noted.
“I’m pretty happy with the way it’s turned out,” he said.
Experts ‘hopeful’ can help bolster monarch butterfly populations across state
A total of 1,708 monarch butterflies were counted on the Fiscalini Ranch Preserve in November, all of which were at the pine flats area, Griffiths said. That’s up from eight the year before.
The incredible increase in monarchs at the Cambria overwintering site is reflective of numbers across the state.
The Pismo Beach Monarch Butterfly Grove, one of the most important overwintering sites in California located several miles down the coast from the Fiscalini Ranch Preserve, has seen 22,445 monarchs this year, up from 199 last year, according to California State Parks.
In total, more than 200,000 overwintering monarch butterflies have been counted so far this year in California, according to the Xerces Society, which organizes the annual tallies of the insects.
That’s 100 times more butterflies counted compared to 2020 data, and the most seen 2016.
Experts aren’t quite sure what exactly has led to the dramatic rise in population this year, but acknowledge that ongoing habitat conservation and preservation efforts are a key part.
“Last year, when numbers were so low, I think some people kind of gave up and asked ‘What’s the point? They’re gone,’ ” Emma Pelton, senior conservation biologist with the Xerces Society, told The Tribune in an October interview. “The better numbers this year are a good counterweight to that, and I think make us double down on our conservation efforts because we see there’s some wiggle room and we can still perhaps save them.”
As Mendoza and Connolly surveyed the ravine area on the Fiscalini Ranch Preserve during a tour on Dec. 20, they pointed out the tiny Monterey pine saplings sprouting from underneath the thin layer of tree chippings strewn across the forest floor.
The small “volunteers,” as Connolly called them, were a sign of the forest’s recovery and perhaps a brighter future for the monarchs and other animal species that resided within the preserve.
Griffiths said the Xerces Society has begun to draft a habitat management plan for the Fiscalini Ranch Preserve to provide further guidance on how to bolster its natural monarch butterfly habitat in both the ravine and pine flats area. The plan will likely primarily focus on tree planting and maintenance, she added.
“All of it will, of course, be contingent on things like budget and water availability,” she said. “But they’ve been pretty successful in planting trees in other areas of the ranch. And they have a really good, dedicated volunteer base, so I know they can do it.”
This story was originally published December 23, 2021 at 3:36 PM.
