That lunch sparked my interest in the Western Monarch Butterflies that color the Nipomo Mesa from October to March. Their migratory procession was something I learned to look forward to. I've learned a great deal about the Western Monarch in the past three years.
Monarchs are different from other butterflies. They are unique in migrating from places as far away as Canada to Mexico and the Central Coast of California. They are also unique because they are a tropical species and yet they populate all 48 continental states. To survive the winters, the Western Monarchs needs to over-winter at hundreds of small locations from Monterey, California to Ensenada, Mexico. However, the main population is concentrated in only eight groves of trees. The most well know grove being the popular one on state parkland at Pismo Beach. Thousands of tourists visit the grove in Pismo every winter and are treated to as many as 100,000 Monarchs hanging on just one tree.
What
most Nipomo residents do not realize is that two of those
other heavily populated groves are on the Nipomo Mesa. In
1999 we lost one of those two Nipomo groves when forty acres
of eucalyptus trees at Via Concha and Willow (adjacent to
the Black Lake Golf Course) were logged. We also lost a
major grove in Cayucos. These two groves may have
represented 25% of the world's remaining population of
Western Monarchs. Prior to the trees at Black Lake being
turned into firewood I called the County Planning department
and asked how this Monarch habitat could be saved. I was
told there were no laws protecting these sites and that the
owner could clear-cut the trees if he obtained a permit.
Within a week the central butterfly tree in the grove was
logged and every tree within a hundred feet of it was cut
down.
I asked Dr. Kingston Leong, at Cal Poly, what would happen as a result of this logging. He said the Monarchs would return in October 1999 to the location of the grove at Via Concha and Willow and would disperse. Therefore, nearly all of them would fail to mate, which would doom that portion of the population of Monarchs. Good over-wintering groves are very special and rare. They need nearby fresh water, they need surrounding trees for protection from strong wind currents, frost and the trees must be large enough for the Monarchs to move to the warmer trunks to avoid freezing when the temperature drops at night.
It is October 2000 and I drove slowly down Willow, pass the west side of the Black Lake Golf Course and stopped to look at the devastation. It looked like a war zone with piles of logging slash sitting on eroding sand. Thirty acres of eucalyptus trees have been leveled. In 1998 there were tens of thousand of butterflies and this year it took me an hour to find ten within a mile of the intersection. The owner of the property has offered a portion of the logged property to the school district in exchange for permission to build more homes. But some significant questions need to be answered. Where have all the butterflies gone? Will there be any for our grandchildren? Do we really want to wipe out the Western Monarch so that every acre of their winter habitat can be developed?
Professor Lincoln Brower, the world's most renowned expert on the Monarch, visited Nipomo last year and said, "There is a very high probability that we will lose the over-wintering sites in Mexico due to uncontrollable deforestation which will spell the demise of the migration east of the Rocky Mountains, thus leaving California as sole guardian the North American migration. Secondly, how can we as First World Americans urge the Mexican Government and people to protect their over-wintering colonies if we do not protect ours (on the Nipomo Mesa)."
The Nipomo Mesa was a forest of pine, sycamore and oak one hundred and fifty years ago when Captain Dana built his adobe. Seventy years later we had cut down our forests and converted it to pastures and eucalyptus. Now we are cutting down the eucalyptus and clearing the land with the hopes of development. The things that are going wrong are the worse possible things. We need to return to native species and return the cleared land back to its native foliage.
S. Boone Productions, Siamak Sehat, Photographer