With Flying Colors

Maria Barrios counted 39.

She wasn’t the only first-grader lying on her back, enthralled by the site of monarch butterflies swirling above her head.

About 40 of her classmates from Grace S. Thille Elementary School shouted their observations.

“Look, they’re chasing each other.”

“It almost hit me.”

This year fewer of the distinctive orange-and-black monarchs have been sighted than in previous years, but that didn’t seem to bother any of the children who gathered at Camino Real Park in Ventura to flap their imaginary butterfly wings and gawk at the colorful, undulating spots in the eucalyptus trees.

Katie Miller, the children’s first-grade teacher, said the outing was designed to help them understand the life cycle in a visual way.

“Most other years there have been thick clusters hanging on the trees, and they can really see them grouped together,” she said. “But [the students] like lying on their backs and watching them fly around. They don’t really know the difference.”

There have been years when tens of thousands of butterflies migrated to more than 300 nesting sites in Ventura County and elsewhere in the state. On Tuesday, about 800 were in Camino Real Park, fewer than last year and far fewer than the year before.

The patterned beauties usually make their way down from the Pacific Northwest as the weather starts to get chilly in October and November. They spend the winter somewhere pleasant, before returning to cooler climates in time to reproduce. Experts have various theories on why the number of butterflies landing in Ventura has diminished.

John Watts, curator of the Butterfly Pavilion and Insect Center in Westminster, Colo., said the reduced numbers are most likely related to continued destruction of the milkweed, which monarchs need to reproduce.

“They should have been there quite a long time ago,” Watts said. “October is the latest that they usually get all the way to Mexico. Undoubtedly, something has caused a great reduction in their habitat.”

Pam Geagan, a naturalist with the Ventura interpretive outreach education program, said the butterflies may be taking longer to arrive because the weather in Ventura has been unseasonably warm.

Geagan accompanied the children on their expedition and provided butterfly costumes and games for them, along with a telescope and binoculars for close-up viewing.

“Normally, they cluster together into a kind of blanket to keep warm,” said Geagan, peering into the quiet barranca where the butterflies danced in the sunlight. “They come here because of the moderate climate, and it’s been so warm here, maybe when it gets colder, they will come.”

Watts agreed that weather could be partly responsible.

“They normally feed on their way south, so they could be taking their time coming down and filling up on nectar,” he said. “That would make them stay in an area longer than they normally would and delay arrival.”

David Marriott, executive director of the Monarch Program in Encinitas, said the insects have already come and gone because of the warm, dry weather.

“They have moved north, where it is cooler,” he said. “If it’s warm, they will fly around and act like a butterfly and they won’t live through the winter. They need to be in a cool place to conserve body fat.”

Marriott also pointed out that insect populations fluctuate, and the presence of fewer butterflies isn’t necessarily catastrophic.

Regardless, the three-hour field trip was a great success, Miller said, because the students learned through playing and interaction about the life cycle of an insect. They made green caterpillars out of Play-Doh and traced sandpaper butterflies as part of an art collage.

Maria Barrios shyly said she hadn’t counted 39 butterflies; she had only counted nine.

“But I like that they can fly,” she said.

Her classmate, Elijah Sanchez, expressed a less delicate interest in the monarchs than Maria’s.

“I like them because they can poison other bad bugs.”