Day 3: Ellwood Main

Today we visited Ellwood Main in Goleta, just West of Santa Barbara. We were both absolutely stunned at the drastically lower numbers of monarchs there. We visited this site last January when a Southwest Monarch Study blue tagged monarch was seen here. In comparison, today we found only about 30% of the monarchs we saw then. Yet the monarchs we did see were beautiful! The clusters were small and since it is still early in the season and warm it was easy to see individual monarchs as they hang in the trees.

It's very dry here and maybe that is normal for November. We noticed that the creek that ran through the area last January was bone dry.

We returned to Ellwood Main in the late afternoon to again look for blue tags. Since it was a warm, sunny day many monarchs were flying, but now that the sun was setting they would return to roost. We kept searching with binoculars and Bob's camera to zoom in on the limited clusters.

We walked to the North Ellwood sanctuary and found five monarchs flying into the grove one at a time less than 30 minutes before sunset. Monarchs can form aggregation clusters in these nearby areas during the fall. In upcoming weeks when it gets cold the monarchs move to the main clustering area usually by late December. So possibly monarchs are clustering in the known aggregation sites in the area and there are more here than what we've seen.

This evening we talked to Paul Cherubini who explained the monarch movements in the atumnal sites. We are very grateful that he emailed us a map with the most common fall cluster sites in the Ellwood area. Tomorrow we will look at these areas before driving north to Pismo Beach then on to Pacific Grove.