(7 Mar 2025)
RESTRICTIOM SUMMARY:
ASSOCIATED PRESS
El Rosario, Mexico – 6 March 2025
1. Group of monarch butterflies on tree
2. Monarch butterflies on ground
3. Monarch butterflies
4. Tourists watching butterflies
5. SOUNDBITE (Spanish) Homero Gómez, El Rosario monarch butterfly sanctuary manager: ++ PARTIALLY OVERLAID ++
"Each year, the community has reforested 150,000 to 300,000 plants, depending on the number of plants we have. This has helped us a lot (to protect the monarch butterflies) because as a result of this, we have recovered more than 300 hectares of devastated forest into new forests."
ASSOCIATED PRESS
El Rosario, Mexico – 6 March 2025
6. Close of sign that reads (Spanish): "It is forbidden to remove butterflies (from the protected area), dead or alive"
7. Monarch butterflies next to water stream
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Mexico City – 6 March 2025
8. SOUNDBITE (Spanish) Jorge Rickards Guevara, Director General of World Wildlife Fund in Mexico: ++ PARTIALLY OVERLAID ++
"The drop (in the monarch butterfly population) is not as sharp as we were seeing in the past. So, that plus the fact of seeing these population peaks tells us that conservation efforts are helping, they are working, but we also have the issue of climate change."
ASSOCIATED PRESS
El Rosario, Mexico – 6 March 2025
9. Tourists in sanctuary
10. Drawing of monarch butterfly
11. Butterflies
12. SOUNDBITE (English) Sylvie Bechard, tourist from Canada:
++ PARTIALLY OVERLAID++
"You can go (see the butterflies) on horseback, it’s very nice too and there’s a lot of monarch butterflies and it’s very nice to see. I see some in Canada sometimes, but here it’s the place for that."
13. Various of butterflies
STORYLINE:
The number of monarch butterflies wintering in the mountains west of Mexico City rebounded this year, doubling the area they covered in 2024 despite the stresses of climate change, experts said Thursday.
The annual butterfly count doesn’t calculate the individual number of butterflies, but rather the number of acres they cover as they gather on tree branches in the mountain pine and fir forests.
Monarchs from east of the Rocky Mountains in the United States and Canada overwinter there.
Mexico’s Commission for National Protected Areas (CONANP) said that this year, butterflies covered 4.4 acres (1.79 hectares) compared to only 2.2 acres (0.9 hectares) the year before.
Last year’s figure represented a 59% drop from 2023, the second lowest level since record keeping began.
After wintering in Mexico, the butterflies fly north, breeding multiple generations along the way for thousands of miles.
The offspring that reach southern Canada begin the trip back to Mexico at the end of summer.
Gloria Tavera Alonso, the Mexican agency’s director general of conservation, said the improved numbers owed to better climatic factors and humidity.
Drought along the butterflies’ migratory route had been listed as a factor in last year’s decline.
Tavera also credited ongoing efforts to increase the number of plants the butterflies rely on for sustenance and reproduction along their flyway.
Butterflies have not been faring well north of the border.
The Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation has been counting western overwinter populations of monarch butterflies — a separate population from those that winter in central Mexico — along the California coast, northern Baja California and inland sites in California and Arizona for the last 28 years.
The highest number recorded was 1.2 million in 1997.
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AP Video by Armando Solís and Martín Silva Rey
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