Monarch Butterfly Count At Record Lows In Mexican Preserves - Globe & Mail

The number of monarch butterflies in the Mexican colonies where the colourful orange and black migratory insects spend their winters has declined to the lowest on record. The colony size totals only 1.92 hectares this winter, the equivalent of about 2½ soccer fields, compared with the previous low in 2004 of 2.19 hectares, according to the latest Mexican census.

Although the slippage between the two years is slight and is being attributed mainly to weather-related factors last year, biologists and butterfly watchers have been alarmed by the trend to significantly smaller colonies. In the 1990s, monarchs occupied an average of about nine hectares of forests each winter, but for the 10 years ended in 2009 the size had fallen to less than five hectares, according to figures issued by researchers at the University of Kansas.

"The trend has been downward for the last quite a number of years," observed Donald Davis, an Ontario-based board member of Monarch Butterfly Fund, a conservation advocacy group.

The main factor behind the decline in 2009 was the weather, with a mixture of drought and excessively high and low temperatures undermining the butterflies across the vast North American territory where they breed and migrate.

EDIT

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/monarch-butterfly-count-at-a-record-low/article1435827/

I love monarchs. I deliberately leave patches of milkweed for them in my back field, mowing around the milkweed.

of them hanging in the trees around me during the Fall.
I would take pictures and it would look like a butterfly tree! Where the leaves would be, were butterflies...just tens of thousands of them ..all over the place. They literally filled the trees and the bushes.
Lately..a few here and there. It is so very, very sad.

Now I know why. :(

even tho' the govt. of Mexico has declared their wintering grounds as a wildlife refuge, there's no one around to stop loggers from taking down the trees.

The population essentially dropped to none after the weather problems in Mexico in 2002.

Of course before that, there weren't really that many anyway. We seemed to see fewer and fewer year after year.

But, that's because the Nurseries are now including butterfly gardens to sell their plants.

There are plenty of people who will raise them in their butterfly gardens, except the Monarch butterfly has a spore, called the EO spore that's killing them, and it's so pervasive that it hardly is worth it for someone to try. You can spend $70.00 on plants just to see 98% of the group fail to make it. But, if someone sells milkweed and monarch eggs that are eo spore free, it would only take one good summer to bring them back.

Monsanto's genetically modified crops of soybean and corn killing 'em off here too! Not sure if that is a factor in the Canadian based article above.
"Imagine a World Without Monarch Butterflies" is a book about the effects of genetic engineering .