Carlsbad restaurant creates butterfly garden to teach diners about the plight of monarchs

At most restaurants, having crawling or flying bugs around your table would be a bad thing. But at Carlsbad’s Seasons Restaurant, a butterfly garden has been planted at the center of its dining patio in the hope of attracting migrating monarchs to the spot during their summer migration.

The collection of tropical and native milkweeds was planted in the restaurant’s raised garden a few weeks ago. Soon after, distinctively striped monarch caterpillars could be seen inching their way along the plants’ leaves and beginning to spin themselves into their chrysalis, the hanging pods in which they metamorphose into a butterfly.

The goal of planting the garden, and the butterfly-themed food and drink items the restaurant is creating for its happy hour menu this summer, is to raise the public’s awareness about the decline of the monarch species. People can help restore monarch numbers by planting native milkweed plants in their backyard gardens during the spring and summer months. Monarch butterflies eat a variety of pollinator plants, but milkweed is the sole diet of monarch larvae.

A green monarch butterfly chrysalis hangs from the underside of a leaf, center left, in the butterfly garden at Seasons Restaurant in Carlsbad.

(Four Seasons Residence Club Aviara)

To purchase the appropriate milkweeds, many with eggs already laid on their leaves, and train the restaurant’s staff about the monarch life cycle, the Four Seasons worked closely with Pat Flanagan, owner of Butterfly Farms, a nonprofit education and conservation organization based in Encinitas.

Flanagan is working with the U.S. Department of Agriculture to cultivate and sell native Carlsbad narrow leaf milkweed plants unique to this region.

According to Butterfly Farms, the migratory Western monarch butterfly population has been in sharp decline over the last 20 years. That decline has been attributed to various sources, including the gradual loss of breeding habitats, herbicides and extreme weather events, such as rising temperatures, heavy rains and drought.

Biologists at Washington State University and other research institutions reported in 2019 that the population of migratory Western monarchs declined by 99% from the 1980s to 2019. In January, officials with the Xerxes Society for Invertebrate Conservation reported that during the 24th Western Monarch Thanksgiving Count in November, volunteers at nearly 250 locations counted just 1,914 monarchs, a 99.9% drop from when the counts began in 1997.

The population of Western migratory monarchs, estimated to be well below 30,000, is considered to be on the “quasi-extinction threshold.”

“We may be witnessing the collapse of the Western migration of monarch butterflies. A migration of millions of monarchs reduced to 2,000 in a few decades,” wrote Xerxes researchers Emma Pelton and Stephanie McKnight about the 2020 count.

To save the species, researchers recommended restoring and protecting the monarchs’ overwintering and migratory habitats in California.

Monarchs spend the summer and fall months in the Pacific Northwest, Colorado and New Mexico, then migrate to California and Central Mexico for the winter and spring. Monarchs lay their eggs on the leaves of milkweed plants. In the spring, they hatch into larvae, or caterpillars, that devour the plants until they’re ready to transform into a chrysalis.

At Seasons Restaurant, staff members who spot new chrysalis pods hanging from the undersides of leaves are snipping those branches and moving them into a butterfly cage that protects the pods from pests and predators. Once the butterflies hatch, Seasons staffers are doing spontaneous butterfly releases with children staying at the property.

Kragen writes for the San Diego Union-Tribune.