If you've lived near the south end of Dolliver Street long enough, you have a personal timeline for the Monarch Butterfly Grove. Maybe it's the year you brought your kids to see the telescopes trained on clusters so thick they bent the eucalyptus branches. Maybe it's a more recent memory: walking the flat, easy path and counting maybe a dozen orange wings where there used to be thousands.
Here's the part that might surprise you going into this fall's season, which typically starts building in late October. Statewide, the monarch numbers actually improved a little last winter. At the Pismo grove specifically, they didn't. The two trend lines split, and if you only read the state headline, you'd have no idea your own neighborhood's colony was still sliding.
What Actually Happened at the Grove Last Winter
The Pismo State Beach Monarch Butterfly Grove tallied 471 butterflies for the full 2025-26 season, according to the Central Coast State Parks Association's count reported by KSBY. That's the second-lowest total in the grove's history. It's not a one-season blip either. KSBY's reporting put the longer arc in plain terms: in Pismo Beach, the numbers have gone from tens of thousands to hundreds over the last three years. Even after the main season wound down, monitoring through the first months of 2026 added up to only around 150 more sightings, a sign the decline wasn't a single bad stretch but a pattern holding through the winter.
One longtime visitor, Hans Gritsch, put it this way to KSBY:
"There's urban sprawl and we're paving things over. The habitat for many creatures is declining."
That's a local observation about a specific grove, not a general statement about butterflies everywhere. It matters because this particular site, tucked between Highway 1 and an estuary at the southern edge of town, has historically been one of the state's larger overwintering colonies. Watching it shrink from a landmark-scale gathering to a few hundred insects is a steeper local story than the state's overall numbers suggest.
The Statewide Count Rose. The Grove's Own Trend Line Didn't.
Here's where the contrast gets sharp. The Xerces Society's Western Monarch Count, the annual survey effort that covers overwintering sites from Mendocino County down into northern Baja, recorded 12,260 monarchs across 249 sites during the typical peak survey window of late November through early December 2025. That's an increase from the previous year's mid-season count of 9,119, which itself had been one of the lowest totals since the count began in 1997.
So statewide, the trend for the 2025-26 season pointed up, not down. And yet the Pismo grove, one of the sites that survey depends on, kept falling. That gap between the state number and the local number is the thing worth sitting with if you're the kind of person who checks in on this grove every winter. A statewide uptick doesn't tell you anything about what's happening in the eucalyptus and Monterey cypress trees a few blocks from your house.
| Survey window | Butterflies counted | Sites surveyed |
|---|---|---|
| Mid-season (late Nov to early Dec 2025) | 12,260 | 249 |
| Late-season (through Jan 11, 2026) | 6,464 | 193 |
Why the Late-Season Drop Wasn't the Real Story
Look at that table again and the natural reaction is alarm: the count nearly halved between the two surveys. But according to Xerces, a mid-to-late season drop of that size isn't unusual. The 47 percent decline fits inside the 35 to 58 percent range the count has recorded over the past ten years. Some die-off between the two survey windows is normal, driven by weather, predators, and natural attrition as winter goes on.
What's not normal is starting the season this low in the first place. Xerces was direct about the cause: a small starting population in spring 2025, paired with a weak breeding season, is what produced last winter's numbers. The die-off rate was ordinary. The problem was the size of the group that showed up to begin with.
That distinction matters for anyone trying to read this fall's early numbers with a clear head. A typical seasonal decline as winter progresses isn't itself bad news. What actually predicts whether the Pismo grove has a better or worse year is the size of the first clusters in late October and November, before any of the usual attrition even starts.
What to Watch For This Fall
The grove's season follows a fairly predictable shape. First arrivals typically show up in late October in small numbers. By early to mid-November, clusters thicken as more monarchs arrive daily. December is generally the strongest month for viewing, with the largest, tightest clusters of the year.
Xerces flagged real concern that last winter's pattern could repeat again this season without favorable breeding conditions over the summer. That's the honest state of things heading into late October 2026: nobody knows yet whether this fall's first arrivals will be a meaningful rebound or another thin season, because the count that would tell us hasn't started.
If You're Going This Season
The grove is free, flat, and easy to reach, which is part of why it's stayed a fixture for so many people who live nearby even as the numbers have thinned out.
- Location: 445 South Dolliver Street, at the southern edge of Pismo Beach, just off Highway 1
- Season: butterflies are generally present from late October through February, with December as peak viewing
- Monarch Mercantile Trailer: open daily 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., with extended hours of 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. during peak season
- Docent talks: offered on weekends at noon during peak season, weather and docent availability permitting, with telescopes set up for a closer look at the clusters
- Parking: visitors can't park inside the North Beach Campground, so plan to park along Highway 1 instead
Each February, the grove also hosts a Stewardship Weekend to close out the season, a community gathering that blends conservation talk with local voices. The most recent one, held on February 28, 2026, brought in environmental journalist Mary Ellen Hannibal as the keynote speaker, alongside a panel of local scientists, educators, and conservation leaders discussing what they're seeing on the ground.
For a lot of Pismo Beach households, this grove isn't a tourist stop. It's a seasonal marker, something you check on the way the roses bloom or the fog rolls back in June. This year, the honest answer to "will they come back" is that nobody knows yet. But if you're the kind of resident who's been watching this particular stretch of eucalyptus for years, late October is when you'll start to find out.
If you're new to town and still learning which local rituals are worth building into your year, the monarch grove is one of them. And if butterflies aren't the only reason you've been paying closer attention to this stretch of the Central Coast lately, Campa Real Estate Group has spent years getting to know these neighborhoods block by block, and we're always glad to talk through what we're seeing.
