Thanksgiving came and went, and the monarch butterflies largely didn't.
Portland-based Xerces Society runs an annual count of western monarch butterflies in California in the lead-up to Thanksgiving. And the early analysis of the numbers shows even lower counts than in recent years, and those were historically bad.
Instead of hundreds of thousands of the insects, there may be only thousands left to perform some critical pollination work. Emma Pelton, Endangered Species Conservation Biologist at Xerces, joins us once again with details of the count.