In the space of two separate City Council meetings this week, Goleta went from cutting down 1,395 dead or dying eucalyptus trees in the Ellwood butterfly groves to removing just 29 of them. The dramatic turn of events was triggered by the Friends of the Ellwood Monarchs, a group that had hired attorney Ana Citrin of the Law Offices of Marc Chytilo to find a solution to the mass removal of trees.
The showdown began after consultants Althouse and Meade, who were working on a habitat management plan for Ellwood's monarch butterflies, discovered that the historic state-wide drought had dried up and killed fully one-fifth of the 6,000 trees. The eucalyptus forest that comprises the groves not only house monarchs during the winter. They are popular play sites year-round, and threading the trails also gives public access to the wide-open mesa and the beaches beyond.
The prospect of a dead tree falling on a child or a hiker caused the city to close the groves in July. But it had to find a way to reopen the area safely before the monarchs, and the hordes expected to come see them, arrived in October during the winter migration . Citrin said she'd gone out to visit the site, walking along the established trails to find where access might be missing. Along with her clients, she said, they figured out that the potentially dangerous trees existed at the intersection of where the butterflies clustered and the public walked, but not throughout the entire forest.