As the monarch butterfly migration through Northeast Ohio approaches an end for the 2024 season, experts are reporting another decline in the monarch population.
Cleveland Metroparks reported fewer monarchs on their way to Mexico than in recent years.
'I'm speaking for, a far larger community here, [a] scientific community," Metroparks Natural Resources Coordinator Jen Brumfield said. "Across the board ... everyone is on alert because that eastern population of monarchs has been dwindling by heavy percentages since the 1990s."
The decline can be attributed, in part, to the loss of milkweed in the region, Brumfield said, which is essential to the monarch’s life cycle. But planting more milkweed isn’t enough to solve the problem.
"That is a step we do want to get milkweed, you know, heavily out into our environment, manage it there. But we also need our native diversity of wildflowers, in these meadows, in these wetlands."
The odds of seeing a cluster of monarchs, referred to as a roost, in Northeast Ohio depends on a few conditions, Brumfield said, including wind and weather patterns.
"It's easy with a wind at their back, to cross over that 50 to 60 miles of open water," she said. "If they have arrived during an afternoon front, so rain coming through, any type of precipitation, a cooling down of the weather, a lack of sunlight, they are more apt to sit tight and rest."
Meadows and wetlands are great habitat for monarchs, Brumfield said, so long as the space is rich with native pollinators the insects can rest and feed on.
Cleveland Metroparks is working to increase pollinator habitats across the park system by removing invasive species and fostering new growth through prescribed burns.
"It takes a lot of scouting time and revisiting sites where we've worked, to make sure that these native habitats that we have are as complete as possible," Brumfield said. "Complete is such a tough [word] in the natural history world because nothing ever is, but we maintain our native habitats to the best of our abilities."
Brumfield encourages residents to plant native pollinators, like milkweed, aster, cone flower and ironweed, in their yards or on their balconies to help increase monarch habitat.
"Your yard can become, itself, a small, tiny little nature preserve," she said. "What that means is, given even a small slice of land that you have, you can make an impact."
Fall is a great time to start planting, Brumfield said, to boost the monarchs' habitat ahead of next year’s monarch migration.
