Ellwood Mesa's Monarchs Nearly Disappeared Last Winter. This Fall Is the Test.

In January, a city biologist walked all seven overwintering sites across Goleta's Ellwood Mesa and counted two monarch butterflies. Not two thousand. Two.

That number matters more than it might first appear, and not because it is dramatic. It matters because 2025 was the busiest year of habitat restoration Ellwood Mesa has ever seen, and this fall is the first real chance to find out whether any of that work is showing up in the trees yet. If you live in Goleta, you have probably driven past the Hollister Avenue parking lot across from Ellwood Elementary a hundred times without thinking much about the eucalyptus grove behind it. This is the season to think about it again.

The Count That Keeps Falling

Ellwood Mesa's monarch grove has a documented peak: 47,500 butterflies counted during the winter of 2011 to 2012, according to the state grant paperwork that funded the site's habitat management plan. That was the high-water mark. Everything since has been a slide, with occasional dead-cat bounces that made it look like recovery before the next crash.

Here is what the count has actually looked like at key points along the way:

Those last three numbers are the ones worth sitting with. The 2025-2026 season never got past 20 butterflies at its highest single-day count in October, according to the Santa Barbara Independent's coverage of the January count. By mid-December it had dropped to four. By January it was two. Biologist Charis van der Heide, who coordinates the count for the Xerces Society, put it plainly on KCBX:

"It's incredibly low."

She has reason to know. Van der Heide has been tracking these numbers long enough to remember when a single tree could hold tens of thousands of butterflies.

What a Decade of Effort Actually Bought

The frustrating part of this story is that Ellwood Mesa has not been ignored. If anything, 2025 was the most intensive year of hands-on restoration the grove has had.

According to the City of Goleta's year-end recap, 2025 brought 29 separate volunteer workdays with more than 1,000 sign-ins. Volunteers planted over 550 trees and 2,500 plants, laid irrigation, mulched, and weeded their way through a damaged ecosystem one Saturday morning at a time. That followed an even larger single push the year before: an October 2024 restoration campaign that set out to plant 1,200 new eucalyptus and 800 native trees across four consecutive November Saturdays, organized with the Santa Barbara Bucket Brigade.

Alongside the planting, fire crews spent from May through October 2025 clearing dead wood, removing ladder fuels, and felling high-risk trees across 60 acres of the mesa, work the city says will resume in 2026. None of that fire mitigation directly grows the monarch population. It protects the eucalyptus canopy the monarchs depend on from the kind of wildfire that could erase decades of habitat in an afternoon.

There is also a science layer that did not exist a few years ago. The city installed a Motus radio telemetry station on the mesa and began attaching solar-powered trackers small enough to ride on a butterfly's wing. By January 2026, biologists had tagged ten monarchs, visible to anyone through the Project Monarch Science app. Some of those trackers went quiet in the weeks after tagging, which likely means the butterfly died. A few stayed active. That is a strange kind of transparency: the grove's decline is now something the public can watch happen in close to real time, individual insect by individual insect.

Why This Particular Fall Is the Real Test

Here is the part that most coverage of Ellwood Mesa's decline misses. Trees planted in November 2024 and throughout 2025 do not become useful monarch shelter overnight. Eucalyptus and native plantings need time to establish root systems, fill in canopy gaps, and start creating the windbreak and humidity that overwintering monarchs actually need to survive a Central Coast winter. That timeline runs closer to two or three years than two or three months.

Which means the monarchs that show up at Ellwood Mesa this fall, whether mid-September through October like they have historically, or later, will be testing habitat that is only just old enough to matter. The 2024 planting is entering its second full winter. The bulk of the 2025 planting has had less than a year to take root. If this season's count climbs even modestly above last January's two, that is a meaningfully different story than another flat year would be. If it stays flat or drops further, that tells you the restoration work, however well executed, has not yet outpaced whatever combination of drought, heat, and storm exposure has been driving the decline for the better part of fifteen years.

Nobody at the city is promising an answer. The last announcement before this season opened was careful on that point: monarch populations fluctuate from year to year, and it is too early to know how many will return.

What You Can Actually Do This Season

If you want to see this play out rather than just read about it, here is where to start.

• Go look. The main viewing grove sits about a half mile, roughly fifteen minutes on foot, from the free parking area at 7729 Hollister Avenue, across from Ellwood Elementary School. Historically, the first scouts arrive in mid-September, with the population settling into clusters by November and peaking in mid-December.
• Take a docent tour if you want context. Guided walks have run weekends at 11 a.m. during past seasons. If you would rather learn to lead one yourself, the city's Ellwood Mesa page lists a contact for becoming a butterfly docent.
• Show up for a volunteer Saturday. The City of Goleta, Ellwood Friends, and the Santa Barbara Bucket Brigade have run recurring 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. restoration mornings for the past two seasons, typically announced a few weeks out on the city's Monarch Press updates. Watch for this fall's dates rather than assuming last year's calendar repeats exactly.
• Follow the app if you're curious about individual butterflies. Project Monarch Science shows the movements of currently tagged monarchs, when the trackers are getting enough sun to report.
• Respect the etiquette that keeps the grove viable. Keep dogs leashed, stay quiet, do not touch or crowd the butterflies, and watch your step for ones puddling on the ground near the trail. No bikes or horses inside the grove itself.

None of this requires living in Goleta forever to appreciate. But if you already do, this is one of those unglamorous, easy-to-miss threads that makes the place what it is, a eucalyptus grove a few minutes from Highway 101 that has been drawing one of the most fragile migrations in North America for a century, and that a genuinely large number of your neighbors have spent their Saturday mornings this past year trying to keep alive.

Locale Group has spent decades getting to know this stretch of the South Coast street by street, grove by grove. If you are thinking about a move to Goleta or anywhere along the South Coast and want a conversation that starts with the neighborhood rather than the listing, we would welcome a confidential consultation.