Not Monarch Butterflies, but my youth included a similar experience with Lightning Bugs. They completely disappeared from our yards by my teens, but before then, a major part of the non-winter experience was catching and releasing them in bare hands at dusk.
Yes. It’s shocking. I spend the past few decades assuming that I’d left them not that they’d left the earth. With covid I temporarily returned to the farm of my childhood and they were one of the most conspicuous collapses.
They used to be so numerous that they defined their own time of day - the magical cooling after mosquitos and before bedtime. Not any more. They are gone and mosquitoes no longer appear to be afraid of the dark.
> mosquitoes no longer appear to be afraid of the dark.
Might be the Asian Tiger Mosquito[0]. They are active 24/7, unlike their crepuscular North American cousins. They also go for your ankles, so you usually don't get the "mosquito whine" in your ear before you're bitten. They've even evolved to overwinter in freezing conditions.
I've noticed that areas in parks that have been left as "prairies" (basically, not mown and wildflowers allowed to bloom) have oodles of fireflies, and mown lawns have almost none.
I bet you'd get a ton of fireflies back if you left a small patch of your yard with longer grasses and wildflowers.
People get annoying at having even areas of less manicured yards, but you'll get a ton more lightning bugs, lady bugs, butterflies, bumble bees, etc.
I'm glad the lightning bugs haven't disappeared in my area, but I wonder what would wipe them out in a region. I'm leaning towards drought, but insecticides and habitat destruction could play a role as well.
I'm in the Chicago area, and I see them in Michigan, Indiana, and Wisconsin as well. This was a good year for them in my neighborhood.
During the covid lockdown, I had some fireflies in my backyard. Gone this year, and I haven't seen them in any of the other years I've been here. I wonder if there's a correlation?
We took it for granted at the time.