On January 3, 2025, the volunteers who conduct the weekly monarch count at Pacific Grove's Monarch Grove Sanctuary logged seven butterflies. Seven. Six weeks earlier, in mid-November, the same weekly tally had climbed past 228. By late January the population had ticked back up to the low seventies, and then the sanctuary emptied out entirely. The Pacific Grove Museum of Natural History's own review of that season noted it was the earliest complete emigration the sanctuary had recorded since 2013.
If you've lived in Pacific Grove for more than a season or two, you already know the town's unofficial motto: butterflies arrive mid-October, they peak sometime around Thanksgiving, and they linger through February. That's the version printed on hotel flyers and tourism sites across the Peninsula, and it isn't wrong exactly, it's just no longer the whole story. The sanctuary's own count data tell a more specific, more useful story: the population is arriving, peaking, and clearing out earlier than the textbook range suggests, and if you're planning around "sometime this winter" instead of the actual weekly numbers, you may show up to an empty grove weeks before the calendar says you should.
What the count actually shows
The most recently completed overwintering season, the one that ran from last fall through this past January, gives you the statewide version of the same pattern. The Xerces Society's Western Monarch Count recorded roughly 12,260 monarchs across 249 sites during the typical peak window of late November through early December 2025. By the time the final survey period wrapped on January 11, 2026, that number had dropped to 6,464 across 193 sites, a 47 percent decline. Xerces itself described that swing as unremarkable, falling within the 35 to 58 percent range typically seen over the past decade between the mid-season and late-season counts.
Read on its own, that's not alarming. It's the expected math of a migratory population thinning out as winter progresses. What makes the season described above worth paying attention to is that it happened a full year earlier than those statewide numbers, back in the winter of 2024-25, and it did not thin out gradually. It held above 200 into early December, then a wind event in mid-December knocked the count down to single digits by January 3, before the population recovered briefly through January and the sanctuary cleared out completely by January 31.
Put those two seasons side by side and a pattern starts to look less like noise and more like a trend: the western monarch population that everyone talks about arriving "in fall and lingering into February" is, at least at this particular sanctuary, increasingly a story of an earlier peak and an earlier exit. The broader population swing behind both seasons traces back to breeding-ground weather. Record heatwaves across the Sierra Nevada, western Nevada, Oregon, and Washington in June and July of 2024 are the reason the 2024-25 overwintering numbers came in so far below the year before. Butterflies that don't get a good breeding season inland don't show up in Pacific Grove trees in the numbers you'd expect months later.
How to actually time a visit
None of this means skip the sanctuary this year. It means use the tool that's already sitting there instead of the generalized date range. The Pacific Grove Museum of Natural History updates its own weekly count on its website every week once monarchs begin settling in, and that count is a far better guide than "sometime between October and February." If you're taking out-of-town guests, or if you just want to see clusters rather than an empty grove, check the current week's number before you walk over.
The museum's guidance on timing within a single visit is worth knowing too, and it's more specific than most guides bother to get:
- To see monarchs clustered and still, visit in the morning before 11 a.m., or on an overcast day below 55 degrees.
- To see them in flight, visit midday or afternoon after 11 a.m., or on a sunny day above 55 degrees, when they're most active in the nectar beds at the south end of the trail.
Docents from the museum are generally on site from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., weather permitting, from October through February, and they're worth finding if you want someone to point out a cluster that from a distance just looks like a cluster of dead leaves. One more thing worth knowing before you bring anyone new to the sanctuary: Pacific Grove has a standing city ordinance against disturbing the butterflies in any way, and the police department enforces it with a fine up to $1,000. Stay on the path, keep your voice down, and leave the dog at home.
The parade that predates the count
None of the counting infrastructure existed when Pacific Grove first started celebrating the monarchs' return. The Butterfly Parade is a tradition now approaching its 75th year, held every year on the first Saturday of October, which lands on October 3 this year. It starts at Robert Down Elementary on Pine Street, winds through downtown along Lighthouse Avenue, and loops back to the school, with each grade dressed in a different costume theme. Kindergartners get the honor of dressing as the monarch itself. The Butterfly Bazaar follows at 11:30, run by the Forest Grove and Robert Down PTAs, with a bake sale and cake walk that's been raising money for Pacific Grove classrooms for decades. It's the kind of event that has nothing to do with the count data and everything to do with why this town calls itself Butterfly Town, USA in the first place.
What's changed around town this fall
If you're heading to the sanctuary this season, the walk back into town looks a little different than it did a year ago. The space at 209 Forest Avenue that housed Max's Grill for 22 years reopened this spring as La Côte Bleue, a seafood-forward bistro from chef-owner Miguel Ponce, who spent nearly a decade in the kitchen at Fisherman's Grotto on Monterey's wharf before striking out on his own, working alongside his father Juan on the dessert menu and his brother Carlos, who trained for a year under Cal Stamenov at Cella Restaurant. Down toward the municipal golf course, the newest addition to the neighborhood's dining scene, The Grove at Point Pinos, opened this month with a dining room that seats 100 outside, 50 inside, and up to 50 more in a private event room. And on Ocean View Boulevard, longtime favorite Crema reopened this spring at 631 Ocean View Boulevard under owner Tamie Aceves, running a limited menu while it works out its liquor license.
None of these openings change how the butterflies behave. They do change what a morning at the sanctuary looks like for the people who actually live here, which is the point. The monarchs are a seasonal fact of life in Pacific Grove the way the fog is, and this year's version of that fact includes checking a weekly number before you go, not just trusting the date on last year's flyer.
If you're the kind of person who wants the local read on more than butterfly counts, whether that's what's opening on Lighthouse Avenue or what a property on this side of the Peninsula is actually worth, Susan Clark has spent more than three decades paying attention to this town's rhythms, seasonal and otherwise. Reach out anytime you want that kind of read, or if you're ready, request your VIP listing consultation directly.
