Late last year, just under the deadline, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service took an important step toward putting the monarch butterfly on the endangered species list.
It’s an important move that’s been a long time coming. The initial petition to do it came out more than a decade ago and population numbers have only continued their decline since.
Kim Pegram, Desert Botanical Garden’s Pollinator Conservation and Research program, has been working to get the public engaged in helping these beloved butterflies and joined The Show to discuss if it could be enough to save this beloved butterfly.
Full conversation
KIM PEGRAM: The Fish and Wildlife Service has determined, with the data that we have available, that there is a high risk of extinction in the near future, which in this particular instance means the next 60 years. And that they need additional protection if we are going to have a chance of saving them.
LAUREN GILGER: Wow, OK, so what would those protections look like? How would this sort of official status change their situation?
PEGRAM: So, listing for every species looks a little bit different, and for monarchs that are so beloved and a lot of people do their own conservation work, you know, planting milkweed in their backyard. This is not going to affect that kind of thing. If they've made the protections more focused on, particularly the overwintering habitat in California, that's where the western monarchs, they spend the winter in these groves along the coast of California, and there's extra protection now for those groves.
Additionally, it'll affect federal projects or projects that may have federal input or federal funding, they might evaluate those projects for potential disruption to monarch habitat. But for your everyday, you know, backyard, any of those kinds of things are not affected by these new protections.
GILGER: And there at the desert Botanical Garden, you've been working for a long time to preserve the monarch butterfly here in Arizona. And it's been like a decade since the initial petition to make this happen came out. What has the situation looked like, in the meantime, with the monarch butterfly? Like, how much worse has it gotten?
PEGRAM: So, the population numbers are still showing a decline. We've had some bad years. Monarch population numbers are measured based on the overwintering sites. So, there are people doing counts in the overwintering sites in California and people measuring them in Mexico, and that's the way that we track the population from year to year. And overall, they're still showing a pretty steady decline with those populations.
So the last status update from Fish and Wildlife was five years ago, when they said the data warranted listing them, but, you know, there were other priorities, and they had to make a decision within 2024. So, they made this decision in December that the monarch will be listed a year from then, so December 2025, after, you know, this year period of reviewing the potential restrictions, and there's a public comment period as well.

GILGER: OK. So tell us why, like, what are the causes? Why are monarch butterflies looking at this kind of dire future?
PEGRAM: There's a lot of reasons we think they are probably declining. Habitat decline is one of the leading reasons. So, monarchs need milkweed as their host plant. That's what the female butterflies seek out milkweed to lay their eggs on, and it's the only plant their caterpillars can eat. So as milkweed has gone away from our natural fields as, you know, as lands are developed, we've lost a lot of milkweed habitat.
We've also lost a lot of nectar habitat. Those are the plants that provide food for the adult butterflies that, you know, provide nectar through flowers. We've lost a lot of that habitat as well. So I would say that's one of the leading drivers of decline.
GILGER: Right, and that's a big part of your efforts at the desert Botanical Garden, to plant milkweed to get people to plant it in their yards, right? Just a very simple thing.
PEGRAM: Right, yes. That is the one of the best things about working on monarchs and talking to people about monarchs is that everybody can help monarchs. It's really easy to do. You can provide that habitat, just like I was talking about. You can provide milkweeds, you can provide nectar plants, and all of that has the potential to affect the long term survival of monarch butterflies.
GILGER: Is it enough? Like, can we as a public do enough, at this point, to save this beloved species?
PEGRAM: So, in my line of work, I have to be optimistic. I am optimistic that there is a groundswell of support. There are so many people that are interested and invested. Even the amount of acres that have been, large amounts of land that have been devoted to monarch habitat, just in the last five years, since the last update, is really incredible. And so, I really think there is a chance, and it's important to remember that this isn't just about the monarch, that monarchs are what we have good numbers for, but there's probably a lot of other species that are suffering similar declines, a lot of other, you know, butterflies and pollinators. And so, everybody can help. Everybody can plant milkweed and nectar plants in their yard, patios, wherever you have space available.
GILGER: Yeah, yeah. So, it sounds like this could have real implications, if the monarch butterfly is put on the endangered species list. Do you think that will play a big role in that optimism that you have to keep going?
PEGRAM: Yes, I think adding habitat is going to be really important, and the listing doesn't affect people's ability to do that. That was one of the things that we were worried about, before this proposed listing decision came out, is that because the monarch has so much support from everybody. Whether it's planting habitat, we've got community science, we've got people tagging butterflies or, you know, recording butterflies, even, you know, with pictures, all of that, because there is so much everyday support behind monarchs, we wanted to make sure that wasn't impacted by the Fish and Wildlife decision. And from everything we can tell, reading the listing decision, it's not. And so that's important is that all of that work can go forward. And we also have protection in these critical habitat overwintering sites in California.
GILGER: Yeah. Let me ask you lastly, Kim, I mean, like, what do you love about monarch butterflies? You must be pretty passionate about this to do this every day.
PEGRAM: So, I'm passionate about the butterflies and pollinators in general. I do enjoy working with monarchs, but the biggest thing for me is that monarchs capture the imagination for a lot of people. It's the one butterfly, if you know a butterfly, you know monarchs. And so, I like that by getting everybody behind the monarch, that we are helping all the other species too. It inspires so many, and that's a big part of the reason that I work on monarchs.