If you've walked up the Taft Street side of Albany Hill any time in the last few years, you've probably noticed the gaps. A cluster of trees missing here, a stump ringed with wood chips there, orange tape around a trunk that used to be part of the skyline. The assumption is easy to make: the city is clearing the eucalyptus grove, and the monarch butterflies that spend their winters in it are the ones who will pay for it.

That assumption doesn't match what the numbers actually show. In one of the winters since the city started thinning the grove in 2021, volunteers with Friends of Albany Hill counted 600 monarchs at Thanksgiving, tapering to 120 still clustered by New Year's, the largest count the group had logged in five years. The removal and that rebound happened inside the same multi-year window, not in spite of each other, and the reason why says more about how this hill actually works than any simple story about trees coming down.

A Grove Built to Muffle Explosions

The eucalyptus on Albany Hill were never planted for butterflies. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, the Judson Dynamite & Powder Company operated a manufacturing plant on the hill's northwest foot, and the trees went in to catch debris and dampen the sound of the explosions that came with the job. The rail stop just west of the hill was even named Nobel Station, after Alfred Nobel, the man who invented dynamite. A 1905 explosion ended the manufacturing on the hill for good, but the trees stayed, grew tall, and eventually became the thing Western monarchs use every winter as a wind-sheltered place to cluster.

That history matters now because the same grove that was planted for an industrial accident is aging out on its own. Blue gum eucalyptus don't live forever, and years of drought stress and pathogen pressure have left a real number of them dead or dying on the hill's crest.

What "Removal" Actually Looks Like on the Ground

The city opened a formal capital project, the Albany Hill Eucalyptus Project, back in 2021 to deal with the decline, and the resulting Forest Management and Habitat Restoration Plan was adopted on March 3, 2025. In September 2024, several large eucalyptus overhanging Jackson Street came down after being flagged as a safety risk, the kind of targeted removal the plan is built around rather than a clear-cut.

That targeted approach isn't incidental. A monarch habitat assessment commissioned by the city and prepared by ecologist Stuart Weiss mapped exactly which trees provide the windbreak the butterflies depend on, and recommended that removal of damaged or hazard trees stay conservative specifically where it would affect that shelter. The plan calls for replacing lost canopy with coast live oak in the middle story, since oaks already thrive on the hill and hold up well as a fuel break, while keeping some drought-tolerant eucalyptus in place for wind protection where nothing else does the job as well. In other words, the plan was never written to choose between fire safety and the butterflies. It was written to figure out how much of the grove can come down before the wind shelter that monarchs need actually disappears, and to stop well short of that line.

The Count Nobody Expected

Western monarch numbers along the whole California coast have been under real pressure for years, and Albany Hill's own count has bounced around with that broader trend, some winters barely registering a cluster at all. Which is what makes that 600-to-120 count worth sitting with. It is the strongest local count Friends of Albany Hill has on record in five years, and it landed in the middle of the same multi-year window the city has spent thinning the grove, not before the removal work began.

The likely explanation is the same one the habitat assessment points to. Selective removal that protects the sheltered pockets on the west and southwest slopes, the SW Bowl and the Upper Meadow in the city's own mapping, leaves the microclimate mostly intact even as individual trees disappear elsewhere on the hill. The butterflies don't need every eucalyptus on Albany Hill. They need the handful that block the wind on a cold, calm afternoon, and so far the plan has left those standing.

Where to Actually See Them This Year

If you want to go look for yourself before the season winds down, a few spots on the hill consistently produce sightings:

• Taft Street turnaround, at the top of Taft, where a wide trail heads south into the main cluster zone
• Pierce Street stairs, a steeper dirt climb on the west side that reaches the ridgeline near the concrete bench area
• The southwest meadow, downhill from the crest, where volunteers have logged the bulk of recent counts
• Peggy Thomsen Pierce Street Park, at the base of the hill, a good stop for a snack or a bathroom break before or after the climb
• The Gill Tract eucalyptus stand, just behind the Sprouts on San Pablo, a smaller backup cluster site when the hill itself is quiet

None of these require a permit or an entrance fee. The butterflies typically stay through the rainy season and start moving down the slopes in search of shelter as storms roll in, so late fall through early February is the reliable window.

The Workshops and Work Parties Keeping This Going

None of this happens on autopilot. Albany and El Cerrito jointly received a State Coastal Conservancy grant to fund a public workshop series on fire-resilient habitat and eucalyptus reuse, and the schedule stretches from this spring into 2027.

That reuse focus is a small but telling detail. Rather than hauling felled eucalyptus away as waste, the city has previously milled logs into lumber for trail railings, retaining walls, and benches on the hill itself, work that Scouts and volunteer crews with Urban Tilth have helped install. The two eucalyptus reuse workshops coming up this October will walk residents through the same process.

Between the formal workshops, the volunteer groups Friends of Albany Hill and TASH, short for Tending the Ancient Shoreline Hill, run their own monthly work parties on trail maintenance and invasive plant removal. Friends of Albany Hill is also still working without its longtime president. Carole Fitzgerald, who reactivated the group in 1992 and led it for decades, died on May 2, 2025, a week shy of her 86th birthday. The mural project she spearheaded on Jackson Street, depicting the hill's butterflies and the plants they depend on, remains one of the more visible reminders of how much of this small park's upkeep has always run on volunteer time rather than city budget alone.

What This Means If You Live Here

The eucalyptus on Albany Hill will keep coming down, slowly, tree by tree, as the forest management plan works through its multi-year timeline. That was always going to happen once the drought stress set in. What that five-year-high count suggests is that the plan's engineers got the harder part right: figuring out which trees the monarchs actually need, and which ones were just taking up space on a dying grove. For now, the butterflies are still showing up in numbers nobody expected, on a hill that was never built for them in the first place.

If you're weighing a move to Albany or the surrounding hill neighborhoods and want an agent who actually knows which slope holds the wind, which park has the bathrooms, and which local nonprofits are worth your Saturday, Red Oak Realty is Seriously Local for a reason. Work with a Seriously Local Agent.