Monarch butterflies made a historic rebound this year, but my photos from 'Butterfly Town, USA' are disappointing and sad

• California's monarch butterflies made a miraculous rebound from nearly disappearing in 2020.
• I visited Pacific Grove, AKA "Butterfly Town, USA," to see the monarch migration for the first time.

PACIFIC GROVE, California — I was afraid if I didn't see them now, someday it could be too late.

I felt the same way about seeing Venice, and every forest in California.

I had to see the monarch butterflies before they were gone.

You've probably heard of the great monarch migration, when the fluttering insects leave Canada in swarms each fall and fly 3,000 miles to Mexico.

But you might not know that Western monarchs spend winter in California instead.

Long-time residents of Pacific Grove tell mystical stories of shimmering curtains of butterflies filling the sky, Natalie Johnston, a local butterfly naturalist, told me. Residents have told her how they would open the front door and their entire garden would seem to spring into the air — monarchs disturbed from rest.

I wasn't expecting anything quite that dramatic when I drove to "Butterfly Town, USA" in late November.

I knew the monarchs' numbers had fallen drastically since those days. Still, I expected to be awed by my first monarch migration. I thought it might feel like stepping into a long-gone world, that orange-and-black wings would flit through the air above, and at least a full tree or two would be alive with butterflies.

Instead, I found a sad, sparse display of their decline: In a famous monarch grove, during a hopeful year, the butterflies filled just two branches on a single tree.

It was a jarring snapshot of a larger crisis.

Like monarchs, countless species of insects and other creatures have been teetering on the edge of extinction for years.

The world as we once knew it is fading alongside them.

"We've gotten used to something that's a pretty diminished version of what it was," Emma Pelton, a biologist at the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation, told me.

Still, those two branches represent a cautious hope. In 2020, there were no monarchs in Pacific Grove.

If we look at the forest surrounding this lonely butterfly tree and how it came to be this way, it can teach us a lot about our precarious future.

The Western monarch migration isn't what it used to be

Millions of monarchs used to settle across California each year, but their numbers haven't breached half a million since the 1990s, when volunteers began counting the migrating monarchs each fall.

In 2018, the population crashed to new lows: They counted fewer than 30,000 monarchs in the state.

Then California's monarchs plummeted to an abysmal 2,000 butterflies in 2020. There were none in Pacific Grove. Scientists feared they were watching the last gasp before extinction.

"It was frightening," Johnston said.

But California's monarchs made an astonishing rebound. Volunteers have counted more than 300,000 so far this year.

Those numbers are still dangerously low, and I knew that — I had written about it. I wasn't expecting the sky to be swarming with monarchs, or all the trees to be shimmering with their wings. Still, as I stepped onto the trail winding through the sanctuary, I saw a pair of orange wings fluttering high overhead and my heart leapt.

At that point, volunteers had counted 12,300 monarchs in the Pacific Grove Monarch Butterfly Sanctuary, a stand of pine, cypress, and eucalyptus trees where the butterflies cluster. Surely that must be a sizeable flock, I thought. That's a number you simply can't ignore.

But the skies were clear as I walked through, with the occasional stray butterfly flitting above. Each tree was bare, except a single Monterey pine, where all 12,000-plus butterflies were clustered. If it weren't for the people crowded beneath the tree, I might have missed it entirely.

'It's nothing, it's quiet, it's empty'

Other visitors murmured about how meager the monarch colony looked:

"Well there aren't that many, are there?"

"Is it just this one tree?"

The two branches were dripping with butterflies, slowly batting their wings open and closed in the glow of sunset, alternating between the deep orange-and-black pattern on the tops of their wings and the muted reverse on their undersides.

I stared at them, mesmerized. But they filled such a small portion of my field of vision, about 20 feet above. I zoomed the camera on my phone as far as it would go, trying to take a decent photo. Instead of joy, I felt a somber reverence.

I had the same uneasy feeling in my stomach that I got hiking on a ridge in Kings Canyon National Park this summer, when suddenly the forest opened up into a giant burn scar, with the blackened skeletons of trees stretching down an ashy hillside.

I walked through the rest of the monarch grove, looking for more butterflies. But the air and the branches were still. I passed a nonchalant deer and a small bird, but no monarchs.

"That's the ecological wound," Pelton said. "It's nothing, it's quiet, it's empty. It's 'Silent Spring.'"

She was referring to a landmark book in the environmental movement. Rachel Carson's 1962 classic documented the echoing absence of birds across the US, as their numbers steeply dropped due to widespread use of the highly toxic pesticide DDT.

Similarly, the main drivers of monarchs' collapse are loss of habitat, the proliferation of pesticides, and a changing climate that alters the seasons and weather conditions the butterflies rely on — the same reasons that so many insect populations are collapsing.

Monarchs are beloved and beautiful creatures, but they're just one of roughly half a million insect species on the brink of extinction.

By some estimates, 40% of the world's insect species face extinction in the next few decades. Scientists are deeply concerned about this apocalyptic disappearance, since so much of life on Earth — humans included — relies on insects for pollination, food, decomposing dead things, and pest control.

Monarchs are bouncing around the brink of extinction, but there's still hope

Butterfly populations are naturally "bouncy," Pelton said, especially when their numbers are so low.

Though California's monarchs have rebounded from the brink of extinction in the last two years, that's "no guarantee that they're not going to bounce back down to nearly zero," she said.

She fears next time, they may not bounce back.

Last year's recovery drew lots of attention, and Johnston pointed to signs of progress in the months since. In July, the secretary of the interior announced $1 million in grants for Western monarch conservation, and the International Union for Conservation of Nature dubbed the monarch butterfly endangered.

The state of California also proposed new restrictions on a class of insecticides that harm pollinators like monarchs, and the state's Supreme Court secured a loophole that allows insects to be protected under the California Endangered Species Act.

"In order for there to be hope for the future, people need to take action. However, it is very difficult for people to take action unless they have hope," Johnston said. "It seems that the monarch butterflies of 2021 were that perfect catalyst to get people to understand that nature can recover when we choose to protect it."

Johnston said lots of people came to the sanctuary in 2021 saying they had never seen the monarchs before and wanted to glimpse their rebound.

That's what brought me to Pacific Grove. I wrote about the butterflies' recovery in 2021, and decided to go see them when they returned in 2022.

Johnston and Pelton both told me about "shifting baselines" in ecology. Basically, in your head, the baseline state of the natural world is what you saw when you were a child.

"[People] ascribe their childhood as the golden years of how things should be, not understanding that, no, the world was already rapidly changing, was already not in a healthy state when you were a child," Johnston said.

When I was a child, I didn't see monarch butterflies, but they were already in decline.

Today's children could reach adulthood in a world where no monarchs settle in California.

Or, depending on the decisions people make now, they could grow up to see monarchs filling the sky again.

As the lone butterfly tree made clear, California's monarchs are in a tenuous — but possibly salvageable — state. What else could we save if we had hope to protect it?

Correction: December 28, 2022 — An earlier version of this story misstated the origins of the Western monarch butterfly count. It began with volunteers counting butterflies in the fall.