Butterflies - In January?!

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No I haven't seen a butterfly today!
The reason for this post is that I volunteer to coordinate butterfly monitoring at Waitby Greenriggs nature reserve (managed by Cumbria WildlifeTrust) and its time for me to submit our results from last year. We submit our results to UK Butterfly monitoring and the results are shown in the graph above. We are missing data from the early part of the year as Covid regulations were to "stay at home" and UK Monitoring were not accepting data until the lockdown was over. There were also some changes on the reserve (they had cut back trees and hedges on a large scale and whilst this helped the special flora (orchids) I reckon it had a deleterious effect on the butterflies so it wasn't a particularly good year for them. The only bonus of the hedge management was that this was the first year in the 12 years I have been doing this when we recorded Dark Green Fritillary.



 



Diary Notes - --- 
A flock of long tailed tits at our feeding station yesterday.
Couple of Kestrel seen in the field.
Brown rats seen at the bird feeder at Smardale whist we were out walking the dog.

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