Ries et al. used surveys of adult butterflies made during July 19 to August 15 by NABA (North American Butterfly Association) and IBMN (Illinois Butterfly Monitoring Network) to estimate end-of-summer population size. The most serious problem with their analysis is with the assumption that the habitats where these surveys were made provide an accurate measure of population size. These counts are made in a variety of nonagricultural habitats. But in the late 1990s, corn and soybean fields accounted for >80% of monarch egg production (Oberhauser et al. 2001). Counts in nonagricultural habitats would reflect the size of the general population of monarchs if the proportion of the population occupying those habitats remained constant over the years. However, over the past decade and a half, milkweeds were virtually eliminated from agricultural fields, resulting in progressively less monarch activity in agricultural fields (Pleasants and Oberhauser 2013) and proportionately more in nonagricultural areas. Therefore, yearly butterfly counts in nonagricultural areas would progressively overestimate the actual size of the population. In fact, if the population remained constant, as Ries et al. (2015) argue, we would have actually expected to see an increase in butterfly counts over the years because of the increasing proportion of the population occupying nonagricultural habitats. Ries et al. found no such increase, which we argue indicates that the overall population was in fact declining.