Help these little beauties fly high
IT’S MAY, and a sure sign of spring is the return of butterflies to our gardens.
Peacock and Red Admirals provide some lovely colour, and Small White butterflies are beautiful, delicate creatures.
Butterflies are a joyful sight in our gardens as well as being important pollinators for our plant life.
These lovely little insects have hunkered down over winter in many different forms – Common Blues and Fritillaries will have stayed as caterpillars in a state of suspended animation, Orange-tips will have survived as a chrysalis and Peacocks and Tortoiseshells will have over-wintered as an adult (you may have even seen some dozily wandering around in your shed or garage).
It can be difficult when they wake up as the warmth returns in spring, especially the varieties that come out a bit earlier like Fritillaries when there isn’t as much pollen about – love them or hate them, dandelions are one of the earliest available foods for butterflies and bees, so try to leave them be until other flowers have emerged.
Stinging nettles too are important, supporting more than 40 different species of insect, including some of our best-loved garden butterflies such as the Small Tortoiseshell, Peacock and Red Admiral that feed on them as larvae.
Results from the United Kingdom Butterfly Monitoring Scheme show that many of our butterflies are not fairing so well. Sadly, even many of our ‘common’ garden butterfly species are in decline due to habitat loss and deterioration in habitat quality.
Luckily, there are lots of ways we can make our gardens and green spaces more friendly for insects. May is an excellent time to make your garden into a paradise for our beautiful butterflies, particularly as Plantlife’s ‘No Mow May’ kicked off on May 1: www.plantlife.org.uk/uk
No Mow May is probably the easiest thing you can do for our insect this spring – to put it simply, do nothing at all!
Pop the lawnmower back in the shed and have a brew instead, knowing that you’re helping our wildlife out. Planting native wildflowers in parks and gardens is another way of helping pollinators by providing the essential pollen and nectar resources that they need to survive, and leaving areas of your garden to grow wild is an excellent way to provide both food and shelter for butterflies, bees and a whole host of other wildlife.
Insects are vital environmental indicators as their short and specialist lifecycles make them sensitive to changes in their surroundings, meaning that they are a useful gauge of environmental health. Data from monitoring schemes and ad hoc sightings are important to track how our insects are coping with pressures, including habitat loss and climate change, and tracking sightings from the public through apps such as iNaturalist can really help with knowing how our butterfly populations are doing, and where they are thriving.
Their lives may be brief, but butterflies are wonderful, beautiful insects that are incredibly important.
Have fun looking out for them in your garden or park!