Most of us who live near the grove carry the same picture in our heads: eucalyptus branches sagging under so many monarchs that the trees themselves seem to be breathing, wings opening and closing in a slow orange tide. That image comes from real winters, and not that long ago. It is also, at this point, a memory more than a forecast.
The story most people repeat about the Pismo State Beach Monarch Butterfly Grove is simple. The butterflies are disappearing. That much is true. What gets lost in the retelling is when the disappearing actually happened, and what that timing means for anyone walking out there this coming season.
The Crash Already Happened. Last Winter Wasn't a Repeat of It.
Look at the counts in sequence and a different shape appears. In the 2022-23 season, monitors logged 24,128 monarchs at the grove. The following season, 2023-24, that number dropped to 16,044, a steep decline but still a population in the tens of thousands. Then came 2024-25, when the count fell to 556. That is a single-season collapse of roughly 96 percent, a genuine cliff, not a slope.
Last winter, the 2025-26 season, opened with an early November survey of 235 monarchs and closed with a count of 471, a figure the Central Coast State Parks Association logged as one of the lowest in the grove's recorded history. Measured against the season before it, that is a further decline of around 15 percent.
Fifteen percent is not nothing. But it is not 96 percent either. The sharpest chapter of this story was already written two winters ago, before most of the coverage and most of the conversation caught up to it. What happened this past winter looks less like a population still in free fall and more like a population that has settled onto a very low, very fragile shelf.
That distinction matters if you are the kind of resident who checks in on the grove every fall out of habit. The question worth asking this year is not "are they still declining," because the honest answer from the data is "yes, but much more slowly than the year before." The more useful question is whether that shelf holds, or whether it is just a pause before the next drop.
What the Statewide Numbers Add, and What They Don't Explain
Pismo's grove is one of over 200 overwintering sites along the California coast, and it has historically been among the largest. Zooming out to the state level for the 2025-26 season, only 12,260 monarchs were counted across all overwintering sites combined, the third-lowest total recorded since the Western Monarch Count began tracking these numbers. That statewide context tells us Pismo's low winter was not a local anomaly. It matched a pattern playing out from San Francisco Bay down through Southern California.
What the statewide number does not do is explain why. Cal Poly biology professor Francis Villablanca, who has studied the local population, has been direct about the limits of current understanding. When asked why the decline has been so sharp, his answer amounted to an honest shrug: climate shifts, pesticide exposure, and urban development along migration corridors are all plausible contributors, but no single cause has been confirmed. State Parks interpretive program manager Danielle Bronson described the early counts last December in similarly unadorned terms, calling the low numbers "definitely disheartening" while noting there was still hope the count could tick upward before the season closed. It didn't tick upward by much.
If you're looking for a tidy explanation to hand your kids on a grove visit, there isn't one yet. That uncertainty is itself worth knowing before you go, so you're not left wondering what you missed.
The Grove Still Has a Season, Even at This Population
None of this means the grove has stopped functioning as a place worth visiting. The eucalyptus and Monterey cypress trees that give the site its microclimate are still there, still providing the wind buffer and thermal stability that draws monarchs in the first place. The Central Coast State Parks Association still runs the Monarch Mercantile Trailer on-site, open daily and staffed with volunteers who can talk through what you're looking at. Docents still lead talks during peak season, weather and availability permitting, and telescopes are typically set up to get a closer look at whatever clusters have formed.
The rough shape of a season still holds, even in a down year:
- Late October brings the first small clusters as monarchs begin arriving along the coast.
- By November, numbers build daily, and cool mornings tend to produce the tightest, most visible clustering.
- December has historically been peak viewing, when afternoon warmth sends butterflies lifting off in loose, drifting groups.
- January often holds steady, though storms can scatter clusters temporarily.
- By February, the migration reverses and the grove empties out again.
Parking is limited at the site and visitors are asked to walk or bike in when possible rather than park inside the North Beach Campground. Admission has always been free, and it remains free regardless of how many butterflies show up in a given month.
The Community Response Isn't Waiting on the Numbers to Improve
One thing the past two low winters have changed is the tone of local programming around the grove. The Pismo Beach Conference and Visitors Bureau built its 2026 Stewardship Weekend around Western monarch conservation specifically, closing out the season on February 28 with an evening event featuring keynote speaker Mary Ellen Hannibal, an environmental journalist who has written on species resilience and the role ordinary community members play in tracking population trends. The event paired her talk with a panel of local scientists, educators, and conservation leaders speaking directly to what stewardship looks like on this stretch of coast.
That kind of programming reads differently depending on how you interpret the count data. If you assume the population is still in a straightforward downward spiral, a stewardship weekend can feel like ceremony without teeth. If you read the numbers the way the trend actually breaks down, with the real collapse already behind us and this past winter representing more of a plateau, then organized local attention starts to look better timed. A population that has stopped free-falling and settled onto a fragile low point is exactly the moment where habitat protection, volunteer counts, and public education have the best chance of mattering.
What This Means for a Grove Visit This Fall
If you're planning to walk out to the grove once the 2026-27 season opens in late October, it is worth resetting expectations rather than abandoning the trip. You are less likely to see the shingle effect and drifting orange clouds that older photos and older residents describe. You are more likely to see a modest cluster, a handful of docents happy to talk through what's changed, and a Mercantile Trailer worth a stop regardless of the count that week.
The honest version of this story is not "the butterflies are gone." It is that the worst single year already happened, two winters back, and what followed was a much smaller step down rather than another cliff. Whether that holds through this coming season is genuinely unknown, and anyone who tells you otherwise is guessing past what the data supports.
If you're new to the area, or you've lived here long enough to remember what the branches used to look like, the grove is still a quiet, free, walkable piece of the neighborhood worth checking on this fall. Just go in with a clearer sense of what you're actually likely to find.
If you're thinking about what else the Central Coast has to offer beyond a winter walk to the grove, Michelle Boghosian has spent more than two decades getting to know this stretch of coast block by block. Let's Connect if you'd like a local's read on the neighborhood beyond the butterflies.
