Autumn 2019
News round True Blue
Hoare puts it: “The Duke doesn’t like the way our conservation effort is funded, with grants awarded every 10 years to remove all scrub in one go. That’s disastrous – Dukes want scrubremoval little and often.”
Taken from ‘Broadleaf South East’ After seeing a Small Blue at the Woodland Trust’s first world war centenary wood at Langley Dale, Keith Elliot masterminded a scheme to encourage colonisation of this butterfly which possibly originated at North Downs.
When I call Dave Wainwright, who coordinates Butterfly Conservation’s efforts to revive the Duke in North Yorkshire, he is resting beneath a tree after reaching “three figures” for Dukes in a single day for the first time in his life. “After last summer’s drought, the caterpillars’ foodplants were wilted and I was predicting all sorts of horrors this year, but I’m counting very, very good numbers,” he says.
Taking advice from botanist Peter Wakeham, Kidney Vetch was planted in 20 ft scrapes on the chalk areas. Keith hopes that the North Downs sourced Vetch proves successful in hosting the UK BAP species. Up with your Dukes
The effort to save the Yorkshire Dukes began in the early 00s, with areas of hawthorn scrub cleared from steep-sided valleys to create a mosaic of suitable cowslip-rich grassland. Woodlands were also coppiced. The key, says Wainwright, was to connect existing habitat to new areas. Volunteers have also been crucial, monitoring numbers to show where the management is working and where it isn’t. Esme Walton, 80, from Helmsley, North Yorkshire, encountered the Duke while out walking one day, and began volunteering to record its numbers every week over the summer as part of the national UK Butterfly Monitoring Scheme.
Excerpt from ‘The Guardian’ website “This is a species (Duke of Burgundy see page 11) that has come back from the brink,” says Dan Hoare of Butterfly Conservation. “We’ve halted the slide towards extinction and in some landscapes, it is genuinely marching back across the landscape. That’s a real cause for celebration.” Hoare, the director of UK conservation at this small charity, headed a programme to halt the species’ extinction in Britain. The Duke’s caterpillars eat common wildflowers, cowslips or primroses, but the butterfly is oddly fussy: it doesn’t like the open downs favoured by most warmth-loving butterflies, nor does it thrive in dense woodland. It requires lightly grazed grassland and scrub, or coppiced woodland.
‘When I was a caterpillar…’ Sciencedaily.com Butterflies and moths are well known for their striking metamorphosis from crawling caterpillars to winged adults. In light of this radical change, not just in body form, but also in lifestyle, diet and dependence on particular sensory cues, it would seem unlikely that learned associations or memories formed at the larval or caterpillar stage could be accessible to the adult moth or butterfly. However, scientists at Georgetown University recently discovered that a moth can indeed remember what it learned as
Conservation scientists began to save the Duke by first assessing the reasons for its disappearance from former haunts: 57% of extinctions were caused by “lack of management” – too-shady woodlands or too-scrubby grasslands. But 27% of extinctions were caused by “excessive management” – grassland grazed too heavily or cleared of scrub. Ironically, these clearances were often funded by well-meaning conservation schemes to ensure that flower-rich chalk grassland remained free of bushes and trees. As 23
