As monarch butterflies begin to show up along the California coast for their annual winter rest, called overwintering, environmentalists and those who love the imperial flutterers are nervously waiting to see what the numbers look like.

Leslie Gilson, known to many as “the butterfly lady,” has been watching the monarchs arrive at Norma Gibbs Park in Huntington Beach for the past week. Gilson has turned the modest park into the top winter home for monarchs in Orange County.

She attributes the low numbers so far to a delay in the migration because of the unseasonably warm weather.

“They’ve been drifting in,” she said. “Last year, they came in a cloud.”

Over the past 20 years, the picture has become so grim that efforts have been launched from the federal government to grassroots levels to help the butterflies rebound.

By some estimates, 95 percent of the national monarch population has been lost since its height in the 1990s, ravaged by the disappearance of milkweed – the only plant on which female monarchs lay their eggs – because of drought, the use of herbicides and overbuilding and logging. In the West, the decline has not been quite as severe, but alarming nonetheless.

And yet, there is a glimmer of hope.

The government is stepping in with millions of dollars in grants to restore monarch habitat, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is considering endangered status for the butterfly.

At local levels, nonprofits and other groups are mobilizing gardeners and homeowners to plant milkweed and other flowering plants not only for monarchs, but also for other pollinators such as bees, which are also in decline.

And in a strange twist, some experts suggest a silver lining in the drought, as homeowners are swapping out their lawns and planting drought-tolerant foliage, among which milkweed is a favorite.

Maybe …

For all the drought has wrought on California, the distinctive black-and-orange butterflies may be a beneficiary.

Across Orange County and the state, many homeowners are creating “monarch waystations” with milkweed that attracts and nourishes the fliers.

Monarchs plant their eggs on milkweed leaves, where they eventually transform into larvae and caterpillars for about two weeks. After filling up on milkweed, the caterpillar spins a chrysalis (not a cocoon) and exists in a pupa state until emerging after another two weeks or so.

Scientists are unclear whether these waystations are enough to offset the drought’s more widespread deleterious effects on the monarch.

Scott Black, executive director of the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation, said there is little science to link the popularity of milkweed sales with the stabilizing monarch counts in the past two years.

“That data simply doesn’t exist,” he said. “That said, the more habitat we can have, the better.”

Milkweed plantings by Caltrans and in state parks will also play a role, Black said. But he noted that despite the gains, overall monarchs are still losing habitat, and the drought throughout the West is affecting their numbers.

Black added that he has been pleased with the growing interest in saving monarchs and bees among home gardeners.

“The neat thing is anybody can be part of the solution,” he said.

Unless …

Susie Vanderlip considers herself among the growing ranks of “Butterfly Citizen Scientists.” A self-described “monarch midwife,” the Orange resident creates a habitat in her yard to attract butterflies. She also wrote a children’s book, “The Story of Chester, The Monarch Caterpillar/Larva.”

So devoted is Vanderlip that if she sees a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis that seems in danger of falling off in the wind, she will cradle and protect it for the hour it takes for the butterfly to fully emerge and become self-sufficient. She has also been known to herd caterpillars to fresh milkweed to feed.

However, she said she has been frustrated by a parasite called ophryocystis elektroscirrha that lives on the exotic milkweed, which is colorful, evergreen and popular at nurseries.

“Eighty percent of my monarchs were crippled,” she said.

Because exotics remain in bloom all year, the parasites are able to live, multiply and infect successive generations of monarchs. Exotics may also interrupt the migration of females if they don’t need to search for new sources of milkweed in winter.

Native varieties, which are annual plants that go dormant in winter, are best for the monarch, experts say. Gilson said the scientific community is still divided on exotic milkweed.

Most experts urge gardeners to prune exotics in the winter to control the parasites.

“I tell people if you’re the type to plant and leave gardens alone, plant the local (milkweed,)” said Heidi Boatman, a docent and merchandise manager at the Pismo Beach Monarch Butterfly Grove, the largest overwintering site in the state for monarchs.

“If you’re the type that gets in there and prunes plants back, the tropical is fine.”

Dark times

Depite recent optimism after some butterfly counts, the overall picture remains cloudy.

In California, the nonprofit Xerces Society of citizen scientists has done one-day counts around Thanksgiving since 1997, when it counted 1.2 million monarchs. In 2014 the count was 235,000, up slightly from 211,000 in 2013, but still 50 percent below the 17-year average.

While the Gibbs site has stayed strong, places like the amphitheater area of Central Park in Huntington Beach, where about a half-dozen monarchs fluttered earlier this week, the San Clemente State Park, Gum Grove Park in Seal Beach and Doheny State Beach, have seen steep drops in monarchs from their heyday.

Doheny still has a butterfly garden, but its days as a top 10 overwintering site are long gone.

There are more than 300 overwintering sites from Baja to Sonoma County. By mid-November, most monarchs have settled into one, coming from as far as Canada and Idaho to hibernate for several months. In late winter or early spring female monarchs fly inland, looking for early sprouts of milkweed to deposit eggs.

Nationally, the 2014 count was 56.5 million, a slight up tick from the previous year but still the second lowest number since surveys began in 1993, when numbers were around a billion. The population was expected to be up this winter due to favorable spring and summer weather conditions in the monarch’s U.S. and Canadian breeding areas.

In September, a consortium that includes the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation announced the first grants to improve monarch butterfly habitat on 33,000 acres nationally. The group is expected to give $3.3 million in grants and could receive twice that in matching grants, according to the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation.

Outreach efforts have begun to encourage the planting of milkweed and other pollinating plants. One of these is the Million Pollinator Garden Challenge, supported by a variety of government and environmental groups.

Although the monarch populations seem to have stabilized for the moment, Black cautions against complacency.

“We’re not going to turn around in a year or two,” he said. “At some time if we don’t see numbers increasing, we’ll have to step back and take a look. The science is developing.”

One thing, he said, is vital: “We have to protect and manage the overwintering sites.”

See also: The future of the monarch butterfly is uncertain