Bringing Back Monarchs One Ranch at a Time

By Matt Dolkas, Associate Director of Communications

September 25, 2023

When he was growing up in the coastal California village of Bolinas in the 1980s, Ole Schell remembers, the monarchs that returned each fall to their overwintering sites seemed “endless.” They clustered in the eucalyptus and pine groves around town, sometimes in swarms so big that—Schell now recalls with embarrassment—he and his friends would shake the butterflies from the branches and watch them fly off by the hundreds.