Signs of Recovery for Threatened Butterflies

PRESS RELEASE for immediate release Help Build A Home For A Woodland Beauty

Wildlife enthusiasts in Worcestershire are being invited to work off extra Christmas calories by improving the home of a rare woodland butterfly.

The Wood White is one of the UK’s fastest declining butterflies, so people are being asked to help wildlife charity Butterfly Conservation (BC) create and improve habitat for the butterfly on Thursday 19 January at Monkwood Reserve near Worcester.

The butterfly needs wide, sunny rides within the woodland to feed and mate successfully and conservation work is needed to help create these conditions.

This event and further conservation tasks taking place in February have been made possible thanks to a £6,500 grant from the Severn Waste Environment Fund.

BC’s Project Officer for the Wood White in the West Midlands, Rhona Goddard, said: “We are so grateful for this funding because it will allow us to carry out practical work like cutting back overgrown plants and weeds and creating the open, sunny conditions that this butterfly needs to thrive.

“Nearly half of all the UK’s Wood White sites are found within the West Midlands and events like this will help us to protect them and encourage the butterfly to spread to other areas.”

The Wood White is the smallest of the UK’s white butterflies and can be seen on the wing between May and early July. In warm years, a partial second brood can emerge around August.

Monkwood Reserve is an ancient woodland site near Worcester which is jointly owned by BC and the Worcestershire Wildlife Trust. The reserve provides a home to a number of butterfly species, including the Purple Hairstreak, Silver-washed Fritillary and White Admiral.

Information on conservation events at the reserve can be found by contacting Rhona Goddard at [email protected] or calling her on: 01746 762 364.

Contacts For further pictures or interviews, please contact Katie Callaghan at the Butterfly Conservation Press Office on 01929 406037, or email [email protected]

Notes The Severn Waste Environmental Fund (SWEF) is managed by the charity Welcome to our Future (WTOF) www.wtof.org.uk. The fund, designed to help mitigate the effects of landfill, uses the Landfill Communities Fund to help local communities in Herefordshire and Worcestershire. For further information about the SWEF, or an application form, please call Bill Richardson on 01386 556222 or email [email protected]

These events are part of the ‘Making a Stand for the Wood White’ project, which involves a number of partner organisations, including the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF), Forestry Commission, the Worcestershire Wildlife Trust, Shropshire Wildlife Trust, Herefordshire Wildlife Trust, the Shropshire Hills Discovery Centre (home of Grow, Cook, Learn), the Duchy of Cornwall, National Trust and English Heritage.

Butterfly Conservation is the UK charity dedicated to saving butterflies, moths and our environment. Our research provides advice on how to conserve and restore habitats. We run projects to protect more than 100 threatened species and we are involved in conserving hundreds of sites and reserves. www.butterfly-conservation.org