Jenna and I have had this trip planned for the past month to search for our last British butterfly of the year, the Large Blue. In addition, we had also booked a moth event in Wiltshire with Butterfly Conservation before starting our butterfly search. We set off at 5:00 AM with Jenna's son, Harley, and I picked up my mother from Holmes Chapel, as she wanted to join us for a family day out!
We arrived at Great Chalford Manor in Wiltshire at 10:00 a.m. The house was impressive, and the traps were filled with moths.
Great Chalford Manor
I couldn't believe how many Moths they had caught!
After a few hours of identifying them, I added over forty moths to my list, and some beautiful specimens were displayed. See below:
Small Elephant Hawk-moth
Four-spotted-Footman
Elephant Hawk moth
Poplar Hawk-moth
Scalloped Oak
Drinker
Swallow-tailed Moth
Yellow-tail
After a fantastic start to the morning, we moved on to our main target species, the Large Blue butterfly. We visited a site in Gloucestershire, Daneway Banks nature reserve.
The quality of the habitats found here led to it being chosen for a project to reintroduce the Large Blue butterfly, which went extinct in the UK in the 1970s. Eggs collected on a Swedish island were brought to the reserve, and in just a few years, Daneway Banks has become world-renowned as a great place to see this butterfly, with the world’s largest population recorded here in 2019.
One of the most striking features of the nature reserve is the large ant hills made by the yellow meadow ant. These small mounds are particularly noticeable in winter when they contribute to a lunar-like landscape. In some parts of Gloucestershire, these are known as ‘emmet casts’ after the old English word for ant, and they’re often visited by woodpeckers, which dig holes with their bills to get to the ants inside.
Daneway Banks has been untouched by modern farming methods, which means it remains an excellent example of limestone grassland. GWT has leased it since 1968 and purchased it in 2016 after one of its biggest fundraising campaigns to date. Chief Executive Roger Mortlock has described it as ‘one of our most treasured and diverse limestone grassland sites’.
Upon arrival, we couldn't believe the number of people searching for the Large blues, and it wasn't long before we saw our first one.
Over more than a century, the Large Blue’s population had been in decline, and it was finally declared nationally extinct in 1979, the last of its kind in the United Kingdom.
The Large Blue butterfly has a unique lifestyle. When it hatches, its caterpillar feeds on thyme plants for three weeks and then drops to the ground, where it mimics the scent and sounds of the Myrmica sabuleti ant, which then carries it back to its colony and cares for it as if it were their own. It then spends the next 10 months of its life with them.
Unlike most butterflies, the Large Blue becomes a carnivorous predator once inside the ant nest. It feeds on the ant pupae while continuing to pose as a Myrmica ant itself, occasionally cannibalising its own larvae in the nest as well.
All smiles after seeing the Large Blues
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