In 2020, the Thanksgiving count revealed that there were fewer than 2000 monarch butterflies in California and Arizona. However, in 2021, that number increased by more than a hundred times to almost 250,000 butterflies.
The Western Monarch Count conducts an annual Thanksgiving count of monarch butterflies arriving as part of their migration to the Western U.S., especially in California. The last time the monarch population was over a million was in 1997. In 1998, the population halved and has been in sharp decline since.
