The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed Tuesday to list the western monarch butterfly as threatened under the the federal Endangered Species List

By Alex Baumhardt, Oregon Capital Chronicle

Millions of western monarch butterflies once visited Oregon and other Western states each spring to drink flower nectar, pollinate plants and lay their eggs after wintering in forests in coastal California. 

But today just a couple hundred thousand make the journey.

To help curb their decline, a federal wildlife nonprofit has granted nearly $760,000 to improve the monarch’s habitat. The money is part of $5.2 million in grants nationwide from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, a nonprofit created by Congress in 1984 to direct federal and private dollars to urgent conservation work. 

The western monarch population has declined more than 95% since the 1980s, according to research from the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation, a Portland-based nonprofit and one of the recipients of the Oregon grant. There were more than 10 million in the 1980s. In the winter of 2023, about 233,000 were counted.

In response, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed Tuesday to list the western monarch butterfly as threatened under the the federal Endangered Species List. If finalized, the listing would protect the butterfly from harm and launch a comprehensive recovery plan to restore their habitat.

“The fact that a butterfly as widespread and beloved as the monarch is now the face of the extinction crisis is a tri-national distress signal warning us to take better care of the environment that we all share,” Tierra Curry, a senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity. said in a release. “What’s bad for monarchs is bad for humans, so we have to stop pretending that our health is somehow separate from that of the wildlife our activities are decimating.”

That sentiment was echoed last month by Oregon’s U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley, who helped secure the federal funding as chair of the Senate interior and environmental appropriations subcommittee.

“If we allow the iconic western monarch butterfly to go extinct, we will not only lose this beautiful species, but a critical pollinator forever,” Merkley said in a statement. 

The Xerces Society will get $300,000 to continue offering free kits that contain native milkweed and pollinator friendly wildflowers and shrubs to Oregon farmers and community groups in the Willamette Valley and Klamath-Siskiyou regions of the state, as well as eastern Washington and California. The idea is to increase the habitat available to pollinator species such as the western monarch. 

The money is expected to pay for handing out kits to at least 200 people, host more than a dozen events and improve at least 500 acres of pollinator habitat, according to a news release the offices of Merkley and Oregon’s other Democratic senator, Ron Wyden. 

The rest of the grant, nearly $460,000, will go to the San Francisco-based nonprofit Pollinator Partnership to support planning and conservation on about 600 acres of private farm, ranch, timber and “working lands” in Oregon, Washington and Idaho. The group will help landowners create conservation plans and will host events to raise awareness about threats to the species and how landowners can help. 

“Monarch butterflies are crucial pollinators on the West Coast, where much of America’s food is grown,” Wyden said in the release. “This investment will support a vital component of our food ecosystem while also helping to preserve a species that symbolizes the rebirth and resiliency Oregonians are known for.”

Both Wyden and Merkley sponsored the 2023 Monarch Action, Recovery and Conservation of Habitat Act, or Monarch Act, which allocated $12.5 million over five years to western monarch habitat improvements. In 2022, Merkely hosted the first Monarch Butterfly Summit with the U.S. Department of the Interior and helped establish a Pollinator Conservation Center at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Alex Baumhardt has been a national radio producer focusing on education for American Public Media since 2017. She has reported from the Arctic to the Antarctic for national and international media, and from Minnesota and Oregon for The Washington Post.