Butterfly Surveying

Hello again! This post would have appeared last week, except that I wanted to say something about the environmental implications of the results of the recent UK General Election (you can read that post here).

One of the things I've been doing over recent summers is to survey butterflies at two sites in Edinburgh. One site is Corstorphine Hill, a wooded hill located near Edinburgh Zoo, the other is Lauriston Farm, the site of the Edinburgh Agro-ecology project, which is a community food growing and rewilding project in north Edinburgh. I'll say more about this exciting project in a future post, but today I want to focus on the butterfly survey itself.

I carried out a survey last week at Lauriston Farm. The weather was lovely, almost perfect for butterfly surveying

but there were very few butterflies, just a handful of Ringlets, a Meadow Brown and a Small Skipper. Earlier this week, I carried out a survey on Corstorphine Hill. The weather was again perfect for surveying butterflies and I had a bit more luck, finding several Meadow Browns and Small Skippers and a couple of Ringlets, including the one below

but still not the abundance of butterflies you might hope for on a sunny summer's day. This fits in with my observations so far this year - I've seen very few butterflies anywhere, very few insects in general in fact. The only insects that I've seen in good numbers have been damselflies and dragonflies. This lack of insects is very worrying, not only for insects themselves, but for all the birds and other animals that eat insects.

I survey butterflies as part of the UK Butterfly Monitoring Scheme, one of the longest running insect monitoring schemes in the world. Established in 1976 the scheme now records data on over 3,000 sites every year. Their surveys include:

• traditional butterfly transects (where surveyors walk the same route every week over the butterfly season, noting all the butterflies seen),

• Wider Countryside Butterfly Survey (WCBS) which provides snapshots of butterfly numbers in less frequently surveyed habitats; and

• targeted surveys.

The results of all these surveys are vital for understanding changes in insect populations.

I'm carrying out traditional butterfly transects, which can only be carried out if certain weather conditions are met, which has made finding a good survey day almost impossible some weeks this year! The temperature needs to be above 13°C in sunshine or above 17°C if it’s not sunny, the wind can't be too high, and it can't be raining. Obviously this is to ensure that conditions are ideal for butterflies when any survey is carried out, and the difficulty of finding good weather for surveying indicates some of the pressures that butterfly populations are facing this year. Butterfly populations can bounce back quite well if good years follow bad, but too many bad years will have a definite long term negative effect on populations.

You can find out more about how to take part in the UK Butterfly Monitoring Scheme here.

Another butterfly survey that is happening at the moment is the Big Butterfly Count, running from 12 July to 4 August across the UK. This survey aims to help assess the health of our environment by counting butterflies (and some day-flying moths).

Here’s an excellent post from Ruth Bradshaw, outlining her involvement in butterfly surveying.

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Update on our Feline Visitor – I posted recently about the kitten who appeared on our doorstep. We advertised her presence as widely as we could in the local area, but no-one came forward to claim her. After a lot of discussion, we took her to the Edinburgh Dog and Cat Home, which will find her a good forever home.

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In the News

UK's new Labour government plans to build on 'low quality' greenbelt land – but what might this actually mean? See this article on the BBC website.

Paris will host “an Olympics of repair and reuse” according to this article on the Guardian website.