Pacific Grove's Butterfly Season Has Two Countdowns This Year

Walk down Ridge Road right now, past the eucalyptus and Monterey pine at the Monarch Grove Sanctuary, and you'll find mostly empty branches. The interpretive signs are still up. The docent schedule board still reads something close to "see you next season." That's the state of things in mid-September, the quiet stretch before the town's most famous residents come back.

Most years, the question locals ask each other in the grocery line or on the dog walk is simple: is it going to be a good year for the monarchs? This year that question has an answer that matters less than the one nobody's asking yet, which is whether the federal government finally does something about the decade the monarchs have already had.

The Parade Comes Before the Butterflies Do

Pacific Grove's Butterfly Parade has run on the first Saturday of October for close to seventy-five years, which puts this year's parade on October 3. Kindergartners dress as monarchs. Other grades have historically taken on otters, farmers, pioneers, or clowns, depending on the year and the school. The route starts at Robert H. Down Elementary on Pine Avenue, runs down Fountain Avenue to Lighthouse Avenue, up 17th Street, and back to Pine, where the Butterfly Bazaar takes over with a bake sale, a cake walk, and carnival games for the rest of the morning.

Here's the part that surprises people who move here from somewhere without an insect on the town seal: the parade almost always runs before the butterflies themselves have shown up in any real number. Monarchs typically start arriving in Pacific Grove in mid-October, with the population not building toward its peak until late November through January. The parade isn't a celebration of butterflies currently in the trees. It's a town throwing a party for guests who haven't checked in yet, on the strength of the fact that they always have.

That confidence used to be a safe bet. It's gotten harder to justify.

The Count That Actually Matters

Every winter, volunteers coordinated by the Xerces Society fan out across the California coast for the Western Monarch Count, a citizen-science survey that's been running since 1997. Last winter's mid-season count, taken in late November and early December of 2025, tallied roughly 12,260 monarchs across 249 sites statewide. Xerces calls that the third-lowest total in the count's 29-year history. By the time volunteers went back out in January 2026 for the late-season follow-up, the number had fallen to 6,464 across 193 sites, a 47 percent drop that Xerces says falls within the typical seasonal range of 35 to 58 percent.

Here's where the "good year or bad year" framing breaks down. That 12,260 figure looks like a rebound only if you compare it to the count taken one year earlier, in late 2024, when the statewide tally collapsed to just 9,119 monarchs, the second-lowest total ever recorded. What that comparison leaves out is the count from the year before that. In late 2023, the same survey found 233,394 monarchs across 256 sites, more than twenty-five times what volunteers would count a year later. A population doesn't drift down from a number like that. It falls off a cliff, and 2025's count is the partial, uneven climb back up. Researchers Cheryl Schultz and Elizabeth Crone have estimated that the western migration needs at least 30,000 overwintering monarchs to remain viable long term. Last year's climb still landed at under half that floor.

Pacific Grove's own sanctuary tells a similarly rough story up close. The Xerces Society ranked it the sixth most important overwintering site in California in a 2016 report, and it remains the largest publicly accessible overwintering site in Monterey County. In that same 2024 collapse, the sanctuary's own count came in at just 228 monarchs, a number that would have been unthinkable to residents who remember the grove clustered thick enough to bend branches.

Isis Howard, who coordinates the count for the Xerces Society, has pointed to pollinator gardens and habitat restoration as reasons the population isn't in worse shape than it is, while cautioning that voluntary efforts alone haven't been enough to reverse the trend. Luck and good will have carried the migration through rough winters before. On their own, they haven't been a plan.

What the Federal Government Might Decide This Fall

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 a critical habitat designation covering roughly 4,395 acres across seven California counties, Monterey included. The Monarch Grove Sanctuary sits inside one of the proposed critical habitat units. The agency also proposed a 4(d) rule, a flexible version of ESA protection that would carve out exemptions for things like routine agricultural work and habitat restoration while still extending legal cover to the species and its overwintering sites.

Federal listing decisions typically finalize within a year of being proposed. This one hasn't. The comment period was reopened through May 2025, and by early 2026 reporting showed the final rule had been quietly reclassified within the Department of the Interior's own planning documents as a "Long-term Action," agency language signaling no movement expected within the coming year. The same reporting put the earliest realistic date for a final decision at the fall of 2026. That's this season.

Pacific Grove already has its own protection on the books, and it predates all of this by seven decades. A city ordinance passed in 1952 makes it unlawful to molest or interfere with the monarchs during their annual stay within city limits, backed by a fine of up to $1,000. What a federal threatened listing would add is protection that extends beyond the city line, across every one of the proposed critical habitat units on the Central Coast, with legal weight that doesn't depend on a local council keeping an old ordinance on the books. Whether that arrives before winter or slides into another year of "long-term action" language is, at this point, genuinely open.

What This Looks Like If You Go

The sanctuary itself is unchanged by any of this, at least for now. It sits at 250 Ridge Road, open sunrise to sunset, free to enter, dogs not permitted. Docents from the Pacific Grove Museum of Natural History are typically on-site from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. once the season gets going, generally October through February, and the museum posts a weekly count on its website once the monarchs have settled in for the year.

A few things that make the difference between a good visit and a disappointing one:

• Go before 11 a.m. on a cool, overcast day if you want to see monarchs clustered together. Below about 55 degrees, they hold still, and from a distance a cluster looks more like a bundle of dead leaves than a mass of butterflies.
• Go midday or in the afternoon on a sunny day above 55 degrees if you want to see them fly. That's when the grove actually looks the way it does in photographs.
• Ask a docent which trees are active that day. Monarchs don't cluster on the same branches year to year, or even day to day, and the volunteers keep track.

Earlier this year, under Executive Director Dr. Rachel M. Miller, the museum built out a fuller slate of monarch-specific public programming than in recent memory, including a documentary screening on the butterflies and a Science Saturday built around animal migration more broadly, alongside the usual roster of guided walks. It reads like an institution treating the current numbers with more attention than routine would require. Meanwhile, the city's own sanctuary manager, George Fuerst, continues an ongoing push to replant and mulch the grove and improve trails at George Washington Park, part of the original overwintering habitat that urbanization and aging trees have chipped away at over the decades.

None of this changes what happens on October 3. The parade will still start at Robert H. Down, the kindergartners will still put on their wings, and the bake sale will still be running by noon at the bazaar. That part of the season belongs entirely to the town and isn't waiting on Washington or on a tree count. The rest of it, whether this becomes the year the butterflies mount a real recovery, and whether the federal government finally decides what a threatened listing means for a quarter-mile of eucalyptus on Ridge Road, is a story that's still being written this fall, in real time, by people with clipboards and binoculars standing under those same trees.

If you're the kind of person who tracks these things because you live here and this is your town, you already know that's the appeal of Pacific Grove. It keeps its traditions on schedule even when the bigger story underneath them is still unresolved.

If you're weighing a move to this stretch of the Monterey Peninsula and want the kind of neighborhood-level read that goes beyond the parade route, Scherling Properties is a good place to start that conversation. Let's Connect.