Sawed-off trees meant for P.G.’s monarch sanctuary spark a police investigation.

James Thomas was angry on Saturday, Sept. 12, at the sight of neatly sawed stumps where four young red gum eucalyptus trees once stood in boxes. He and fellow Pacific Grove resident Bob Pacelli had recently lifted and hauled the heavy boxes to their temporary home at the P.G. Adult School while Pacelli waited for city approval to take them into the monarch butterfly sanctuary across the street.

Thomas took his anger to social media, offering a $500 reward for information leading to an arrest with $200 coming from his family (his mother, Barbara Thomas, served on the P.G. Beautification and Natural Resources Committee) and $300 from an anonymous donor.

“My little reward is kind of out of a sense of revenge for having dragged them out there,” Thomas says.

As of Sept. 14 he’d received no tips, only an outpouring of shared anger, as well as financial contributions to Pacelli’s GoFundMe fundraiser, launched last year to buy more trees.

Those efforts are separate from the city’s, which owns the 2.7-acre parcel. Sanctuary Manager Caleb Schneider is racing to meet a goal of 50 trees planted by Oct. 1, when the monarch overwintering season begins and major work must stop until April.

“The long and short of it is plant, plant, plant,” Schneider says.

Half of the trees, mostly Monterey cypress with a few bottlebrush, came thanks to Pacelli’s fundraising efforts. The other half – a mix of red gum eucalyptus, blue gum eucalyptus, toyon and coast live oak, as well as ceanothus shrubs – were purchased by the city.

City officials are playing catch-up, after years of neglecting to follow through on annual recommendations by a consultant to plant more trees. It’s also contended with a tug-of-war between factions arguing over how the sanctuary should be managed. One battle in that war is between those who believe only native species should be planted and those who say interplanting natives with non-natives known to be favored by monarchs is best.

Pacelli theorizes that it might have been a pro-natives person who sawed the trees, but he’s not sure.

It’s not the first time eucalyptus he’s provided have been vandalized: In January, right before the first-ever Monarch Summit 2020 attended by researchers and citizen scientists from all over the country, someone poisoned several boxed red gum eucalyptus, and the trees died all at once. The dead trees were hard to miss as conference-goers took a tour on Jan. 9. The Monterey cypress nearby were untouched.