![]() But after his department head suggested he study butterflies, he was quickly converted. "We need hope, don't you think?"Īs a professor at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, Leong once specialized in insect pests. "I think we need optimism to survive," he said. He has observed that the sight of overwintering monarchs tends to give people a sense of optimism. Leong thinks this is an important development - for people as well as for butterflies. The data made clear what many have been noting since October: The monarchs are back, even if it's far from the millions that arrived as recently as the '80s. There were fewer than 2,000 the year before. The Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation announced in late January that community scientists had reported 247,000 overwintering butterflies in the 2021 Western Monarch Thanksgiving Count. But this one comes after two years when the butterflies had all but disappeared. In any year, the overwintering of monarch butterflies on the California coast is a phenomenon. Leong pointed out that the sunlight shining through their patterned, orange-gold wings made them glow like stained glass in a cathedral. Two interlocked butterflies looped upward, a tumbling bright orange against bright-blue sky, landing on the top of a Monterey pine. Kingston Leong, an entomologist who watches over this and other little-known Central Coast monarch havens - and the first to document hurtling-from-the-treetops mating behavior - kept his eyes on the butterflies missed by Shilo's paws. "Careful, Shilo! Don't step on the butterflies," called her owner, Nate Everitt, who lives nearby and volunteers in the Coastal Access Monarch Butterfly Preserve in Los Osos. One pair landed next to a black Labrador stretched out in dappled sun. In a small eucalyptus grove at the end of a housing tract, it was raining butterflies. Mating season, which sometimes involves the male monarch hurtling the female from canopy to earth, had come early. It was the sound of pairs of monarch butterflies hitting the ground. There was the distinctive noise of something falling. ![]()
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