If you have lived in Goleta long enough to remember taking your kids to Ellwood Mesa on a cold December morning, you know the choreography. You park across from Ellwood Elementary, walk the half mile of dirt trail past the old eucalyptus windrows, and if the timing is right, you see it: thousands of monarchs clustered so tightly on the branches that the trees themselves seem to be breathing.
That is not what you would have found this past winter, and it is not what you will find if you walk out there right now, in the middle of August. There are no butterflies in the grove at all this month. There will not be until late October at the earliest. But the grove is not empty of activity. It is the season when the City of Goleta does the physical work on the forest itself, and when volunteers sign up to plant the trees that this fall's monarchs, if they come, will need.
The number that actually matters
Start with what the city's own count found this past season. The high point, in October 2025, was 20 butterflies across the grove. By the time the January count came around, staff recorded exactly two monarchs at Ellwood's overwintering sites. Not two thousand. Two.
Set that against the memory most longtime residents are carrying around. Xerces Society volunteer biologist Charis van der Heide, who has been part of the official Western Monarch count for years, put the historical scale in plain terms:
"Just for context, maybe 20 years ago there were 50,000 butterflies just in one spot at Ellwood Mesa."
And it is not that monarchs vanished everywhere on the coast that same week. Pismo Beach's grove, a few hours up the coast, counted more than 14,000 butterflies during the same January stretch. Whatever is happening at Ellwood is not simply a bad year for Western monarchs as a species. It is a bad year for this specific grove.
| Count | Number |
|---|---|
| Ellwood Mesa, roughly 20 years ago | ~50,000 |
| Ellwood Mesa, October 2025 (this season's peak) | 20 |
| Ellwood Mesa, official January 2026 count | 2 |
| Pismo Beach, same week in January 2026 | 14,000+ |
The City of Goleta's own figures put the longer decline at 95 percent since the 1980s, which means this year's collapse is not an outlier so much as the current low point on a line that has been falling for four decades.
The crash started last summer, not this winter
It is tempting to blame the storms. The January count itself had to be pushed back nearly two weeks because of heavy rain, and wet, cold, windy conditions really do make it harder for monarchs to hold onto a branch. But van der Heide pointed to something that happened months earlier, back when nobody in Goleta was thinking about butterflies at all. The breeding season before this winter ran hotter than usual, and monarch caterpillars are unusually sensitive to heat. A rough summer inland, far from any eucalyptus grove on the Goleta coast, may have already limited how many butterflies were ever going to make the trip west.
Layer that on top of the pressures that have been building for years: the loss of milkweed habitat monarchs need to breed, pesticide use, and the slow erosion of open land to development. The storms did not start the decline. They arrived at a population that was already too thin to absorb a bad week of weather.
There is also a legal dimension sitting unresolved in the background. Monarchs were proposed for federal endangered species listing back in 2024, and as of the city's January 2026 count, that decision had still not been made. Nothing about how the grove is managed changes because of a listing that has not happened, but the question was still open as this season's numbers came in.
Why the grove itself needs work, not just patience
Here is the part that does not show up in a headline about butterfly counts. The City of Goleta has been studying Ellwood Mesa's habitat since 2017, and the core problem is not just fewer monarchs showing up. It is that the eucalyptus forest itself has aged past the point where it can do its job. A healthy grove needs a thick outer border of trees to block wind and storms, protecting the interior trees where monarchs actually cluster. As trees die or thin out, that buffer weakens, and the storms that used to be survivable start doing real damage to whatever butterflies do arrive.
That is why the work the city is doing now, funded in part through the California State Coastal Conservancy, is scheduled specifically outside the roosting season. Clearing dead and dying trees, restoring the understory, and planting new natives has to happen in the months the grove is empty, which means right now, in August, is exactly when it happens. The city is also asking for community volunteers to help plant the trees this fall's monarchs would need if they return, with sign-ups open for planting dates ahead of the season.
There is a smaller but genuinely interesting thread running alongside the restoration work. Researchers tagged ten monarchs at Ellwood this past season with solar-powered tracking devices, part of an ongoing project that lets anyone follow individual butterflies on the Project Monarch Science app. Some of those tagged monarchs stopped transmitting months ago, which likely means they did not survive. A few were still active as of the January report. It is a small, oddly personal way to watch a population crisis play out one animal at a time, and it is available to any Goleta resident with a phone.
What a fall visit will actually look like
If you want to see whether any of this work changes what shows up in November, the practical details are straightforward. Parking for the Goleta Butterfly Grove is at 7729 Hollister Avenue, directly across from Ellwood Elementary School, and the grove itself is a little over half a mile in on marked trails. There is a second access point off Coronado Drive on the residential side of the mesa, closer to the Sperling Preserve entrance, if that is a shorter walk from your part of town.
A few rules are worth knowing before you go, not because they are complicated but because they are easy to forget once you are standing under a tree full of monarchs:
- Dogs are welcome but must stay on a leash the entire time
- No bicycles, horses, drones, or motorized vehicles are allowed inside the grove itself
- Flash photography is discouraged since it can startle a resting cluster
- There are no trash cans inside the forest, so plan to carry everything back out
Docents typically staff the grove on Saturdays and Sundays from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. during the season, running roughly from mid-November through mid-February, and they are usually the fastest way to learn where the butterflies are actually clustering on a given weekend rather than walking the whole trail system guessing. Monarchs tend to arrive in late October, so the first real test of this summer's restoration work will come within the next two to three months.
The season that decides the season
The honest version of this story is that nobody knows yet whether the tree planting, the fuel reduction, and the tagging project will be enough to bring monarchs back to Ellwood in any real number this fall. What is true is that the outcome is being shaped right now, in the empty grove, not next winter when the counts start again. If you have walked Ellwood Mesa for years and always thought of the butterfly season as something that simply happens to the neighborhood each winter, this is the year to notice that the real work happens in the months nobody is watching.
Lisa Foley has covered this stretch of the Santa Barbara coast for more than 25 years, and she still makes the walk out to Ellwood most falls to see who has come back. If you are thinking about property anywhere along the Goleta or greater Santa Barbara coastline, or you just want a local's read on what is changing in the neighborhoods she covers, reach out to Lisa Foley.
