The Pismo Beach monarch butterfly experience really comes in three stages.

1) You arrive at a small and perfectly unremarkable grove of eucalyptus trees… well, the trees are impressive, quite tall, but no different than a hundred other small groves around here. As you walk up the path toward the docent’s booth out in the open and the small knot of people gathered under the trees, you will notice monarch butterflies fluttering all around, from maybe twenty feet high up to the tops of the trees. Dozens and dozens of them. You think, "My, my, isn’t that lovely?"

2) You get under the trees and look in the direction everybody else is looking. Immediately you see them. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of butterflies, some flying around, some clinging to the tree trunks, even more out on the branches. You think, "Wow! That is really something!"

3) Then there comes a time, almost a Zen moment of enlightenment, when you realize that what you had thought were small, dead leaves … are butterflies. That MOST of the butterflies here are perched with their wings FOLDED rather than spread, that the undersides of their wings are pretty much the beige color of the eucalyptus bark, and that for every orange pair of wings you see (hundreds and hundreds and even more hundreds than you thought you saw at first) for every pair of spread wings showing the brilliant orange and black, there are four or five with their wings folded … that you are in fact seeing thousands and thousands and thousands and THOUSANDS of monarchs! That they are clustered so tightly that some of the smaller branches are actually being bent downward. Bent by the weight of BUTTERFLIES!

And not a one of them has ever been here before. They found their way here from Canada … well, their grandparents started south from Canada, anyway, these particular ones were probably born in Nevada or northern California … to this small grove in Pismo Beach using homing methods that are a complete mystery to us.

The sign at the grove claims there are now 30,000 butterflies present. (Who counts them? I don’t know. Possibly the PBDBE, the Pismo Beach Department of Butterfly Enumeration.) The sign claims that in 1990 there were 200,000 of them, a record high, but in 2001 a record low of only 20,000. If so, this year is already something of a comeback. Many of them are tagged with tiny paper dots with numbers on them, plus a toll free number to call if you find one. We were told that over 4000 were tagged here last winter. If you find one, please call it in.

I’d sure like to see 200,000 monarchs in one tree ...