In the imagery bank filed away in Ole Schell's mind, he can recall growing-up on his father's cattle ranch in the West Marin bohemian enclave of Bolinas, trees dripping with Monarch butterflies. In fact, you could shake the branch of a eucalyptus tree, and thousands of the ornately painted butterflies would take wing.
"The monarchs are sort of a magical creation," Schell said, standing on the family ranch with the Pacific Ocean as backdrop. "It was a very special thing that I guess I took for granted as a kid to see this magical insect."
Schell eventually went off to college and remained in New York for a couple decades, but when he returned to Bolinas around 2016 he was stunned to see the monarchs had not. In the fields and eucalyptus trees where the butterflies had wintered each year, there was only the occasional colorful straggler.
"What once seems totally abundant was totally gone," Schell bemoaned.
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Schell's observations coincided with the grim numbers from annual state butterfly counts. From the 1980s when California's monarchs numbered in the millions, more recent years had witnessed a rapid decline in their population, bottoming out in 2020 when only an estimated 1850 monarch butterflies returned to the state.
"They had entered an extinction vortex," Schell said ominously. "To see a species just completely all but disappear is very shocking."
Experts blame the monarch's rapid decline on the state's now-frequent wildfires, pesticide use and the loss of habitat to development.
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Their absence triggered Schell's childhood memories of his youth growing up on the renowned Niman-Schell Ranch, which pioneered natural grass-fed beef. His memories of working the fields and feeding the cattle were colored with images of plants and trees laden with butterflies.
Whether it was a desire to revive that childhood, or a sense of environmental responsibility implanted through ranch life -- Schell felt compelled to take some sort of action.
So he reached out to the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation -- a non-profit organization devoted to the conservation of invertebrates -- to come up with a plan to turn plots of the ranch land into prime monarch butterfly habitat.
The group gave him a list of hundreds of nectar plants, preferred by monarchs. Schell bought 1200 plants, cleared a couple large plots of land, and fenced them in to protect his budding plants from hungry deer and other critters.
He planted seaside daisy, tufted hair grass, lemon verbena, golden bush lupin among the hundreds of other varieties. He also put his own twist on the group's formula, adding fruit trees like figs and avocado along side wild berries.
His efforts immediately generated a buzz among bees, who frequented his plants -- but the true test came this past winter when the monarch's normally make their appearance.
He was excited and relieved when he saw the first one arrive and set on one of his new plantings.
"When I saw the first butterfly land on one our flowers," he recalled, "it was a beautiful experience and then more came and more came."
The number of returning monarchs to what Schell calls the West Marin Monarch Sanctuary was a far cry from their historic numbers, but it was a positive sign he'd at least set out on the right path.
"I remember chasing one down and filming it in slow motion and watching it over over again," said Schell, who makes documentary films.
The positive results of his newly created butterfly habitat mirrored positive news from the state, which saw a partial butterfly rebound in 2021 which experts estimate at 250 thousand. Schell hopes to build on his success and attract more and more monarchs each year to his site.
"Now it’s like a couple at a time that come back," Schell said. "But it’s more than it was before we did this."
The plight of Bolinas' monarchs also touched a nerve with local photographer Elizabeth Weber who grew up on a ranch not far from Schell's, and also recalled the monarch's ubiquitous presence in her childhood.
As the monarch population dipped into grim territory, she began to photograph their migration to other popular butterfly sites in the state, and turned it into a gallery exhibition now on display in the Bolinas Museum.
"The monarchs, they need us to respond right now to their decline," Weber said. "And if we don’t, we risk losing them."
Rather than colorful photos of the monarchs, Weber's photos show the lifespan from caterpillar, to chrysalis and emergence -- all treated in sobering sepia tones to reflect the tenuous crisis impacting the insect's population.
"That’s what I’m trying to touch on with these photos and this project," Weber said. "Touching with them, memory of them, and also their absence and their loss."
In addition to attracting butterflies, Schell's butterfly project now attracts school tours and community gatherings in an effort to raise awareness to the issue and generate potential solutions. His goal is to get others to create similar habitats where they can to give the monarchs a fighting chance.
But Schell admits the ranch has one secret weapon, a pond his father and his business partner developed in the 1970s that thrives from rain and runoff -- giving the site a reliable source of water during California's devastating droughts. His vision is to create a monarch corridor, that will build on the positive signs from their recent rebound. The fact that monarch butterflies have come back in Central and Southern California," Schell said, "I think is a super hopeful sign."
