Wildlife charity Butterfly Conservation has today released data about the number of butterflies counted in this year’s Big Butterfly Count (17th July – 9th August 2020). Worryingly this summer’s Count has seen a reduction in the average number of butterflies logged per count of -34% in comparison with 2019 and the lowest average number of butterflies logged overall since the event began eleven years ago. In all, during this year’s Big Butterfly Count, over 1.4 million butterflies were counted across the UK.
Dr Zoë Randle, Senior Surveys Officer at Butterfly Conservation said: “Unfortunately, this summer has not seen an abundance of butterflies, across the UK. We do see peaks and troughs of butterfly numbers each year (last year for example we saw a huge influx of migrant Painted Lady butterflies), so the data from the Big Butterfly Count is an important snapshot which, along with our other monitoring schemes, helps our understanding of the rates of decline of butterflies and moths”.
She went on to say: “Coming so shortly after the recent WWF and UN reports on the global biodiversity crisis these 2020 results illustrate the perilous state of wildlife in the UK. However, the fact that so many people take part in this exciting citizen science initiative is encouraging and makes a huge difference to our understanding of how the natural world is responding to the crisis it is in. Now we need to see initiatives both here and across the world to put nature on a path to recovery”.
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Posted On: 28/09/2020