Hello Everyone, Now that Storm Darragh has slipped into the Continent after doing its worst for us here in the UK, hopefully we should now get some quiet days with the possibility of some sun although with only 8 hours of daylight available we can’t expect too many butterfly sightings, but nevertheless since the last Update there have been a couple of butterflies seen flying outside…namely a Red Admiral seen flying at Glossop by Jean Ashcroft on the 15th of November 2024 and a Small Tortoiseshell was seen on the 3rd of December 2024 by Tom Aspinall, which was sunning itself on the wall of Barbrook Cottage on the Eastern Moors.
Meanwhile both Sid Morris & Mark Radford have been exploring old rail tunnels in the County and Sid failed to see any hibernating butterflies or moths in the Monsal Trail tunnels recently (Headstone; Cressbrook; Litton) but they had more success in North East Derbyshire when they found 10 Peacocks and 79 Herald moths hibernating in tunnels at Spinkhill and at Markham.
I have recently read some good and some bad news relating to one of our most precious commodities, namely water… the bad news is that the insect killing pesticide neonicotinoids have been found in 85% of rivers tested in the UK…this pesticide is mainly used in the sugar beet section of farming and is banned in Europe…the current Government is hopefully going to ban its use in the UK very soon? The good news is that an Environmental Consultancy (Wildscapes CIC) is actively seeking farmers and landowners who would like a wildlife pond built on their land in Derbyshire so as to provide a habitat for the Great Crested Newt amongst other species that should be attracted to it …they have already delivered over 320 ponds across Yorkshire and North Lincolnshire in the last 5 years and the Group are also able to restore ponds that are in a very poor state of repair – the scheme is fully funded by Natural England as well as Wildscapes (wildscapes.co.uk pond-creation) – (see the attached info for details)
Now that I have managed to download all the 2024 transect data for the 139 sites that were covered in Derbyshire this year, the preliminary results show that overall numbers of butterflies seen on transects declined by 40% despite the fact that transects walked together with sites monitored increased by a modest 3% – what is worse is that sites which had in excess of 1,000 butterflies noted during the 26 week transect period declined from 37 sites in 2023 to just 13 sites in 2024 a massive 65% reduction. ( have a look at the attached sheet for details). We can only hope that butterfly numbers and species will recover somewhat in 2025 – only with your help will we be able to confirm this situation.
