The warm and sunny summer of 2013 enabled British farmland butterflies to bounce back from a crash in numbers in 2012, a new survey has found. Results of the Wider Countryside Butterfly Survey (WCBS) show that the majority of farmland species have recovered after the worst year on record for butterflies in 2012, when 52 […]
Tag: Meadow Brown
Warm summer helps butterflies bounce back in the UK
The Azores high is seeing small tortoiseshells and meadow browns returning to gardens and the countryside in heartening numbers after butterflies suffered their worst year on record in 2012. People are being urged to help measure how these insects are bouncing back in the sunshine by joining the Big Butterfly Count, the world’s largest butterfly […]
Butterflies, Bugs and other Insects
Weather dominates the lives of all living things and changing weather patterns have an effect on the life cycles of most species on the planet. We talk about the weather all the time and European weather, if not global weather are going through changes. In south-west Spain we are feeling and experiencing unsettled and abnormal […]
On the trail of the large tortoiseshell, the UK’s most elusive butterfly
It was, joked Matthew Oates, a “lunatic fringe” mission. Scouring the hedgerows for the caterpillar of a butterfly that has been extinct for more than half a century might not be most people’s idea of fun, but Oates, a National Trust naturalist, has spent 50 summers tracking down the most elusive British butterflies. I joined […]