Butterfly Monitoring Scheme

The report on last year's Butterfly Monitoring Scheme recently published includes a league table based on sightings of butterflies at the 78 habitats recorded under the scheme in 1982.

Members will not be surprised to learn that top of the league was the Meadow Brown with 44,066 separate sightings (25% of the total), followed by Gatekeeper, Green-veined White, Small Tortoiseshell, Small Heath, and Small Skipper. More surprising perhaps were the showing of a number of species lower down the list. Thus Small White could do no better than 10th while Large White comes 14th below Grayling and Marbled White. Also interesting are the relatively strong showings of Chalkhill Blue in 16th place above Red Admiral and Adonis Blue at 21st two places ahead of the Comma.

Of course care has to be taken in the interpretation of this kind of data and it would be wrong to suggest that these figures hold good for the country as a whole. Obviously the 78 sites chosen are very untypical in many ways in that most are declared nature reserves where special efforts are being made to conserve the rarer species, and the way of aggregating counts is bound to over-emphasise those species which form strong colonies. Thus, although over 3,000 Chalkhill Blues were seen last year, they were only found on 8 sites and nearly 2,000 Adonis Blues on just 4. Out of interest the three relegation (extinction?) candidates were White Letter Hairstreak, Wood white and Purple Emperor.