23/07/2025
Thank you to the for sending us this exciting piece of newsâŠ
Rare and elusive butterfly found on Quantock Hills for first time in 18 years
White-letter hairstreak butterflies are probably one of the hardest butterflies in the UK to find due to their small size and that the fact that they spend most of their life high up in the branches of elm trees, with only 5 sightings within the Quantock Hills National Landscape (formally AONB) in 75 years.
Conservation charity Friends of the Quantocks celebrated its 75th anniversary last year with the launch of the âNature of the Quantocksâ book and Elm & Hairstreak Butterfly Project, setting out to re-discover the butterfly on the Quantocks and to provide additional habitat, via the planting of disease resistant strains of elm tree. Following training from Butterfly Conservation in October, which included the use of infra-red torches to find the caterpillars, three caterpillars were found in May and 10 butterflies have been seen over the last month, more than tripling the total found over the last 75 years.
Robin Stamp, chair of the charity, says, âThese butterflies are a real challenge to find, living as they do on mature (flowering) elm, more commonly seen dead than alive due to Dutch Elm Disease which decimated the tree in the seventies and continues to do so. Once you have found a live flowering elm, you are then looking for a butterfly about the size of your thumbnail usually found thirty up in the trees!
âWhilst it is great to have found the butterfly this year, it is sobering to also record dead and dying trees alongside butterflies!â Having planted its first 140 disease-resistant elm trees in January this year, the charity now plans to plant more trees this coming winter, supported by donations and Farming in Protected Landscapes (FIPL) grants.
For further information visit www.friendsofthequantocks.org
Photo courtesy of Butterfly Conservation , taken by Gilles San Martin
