Butterflies Born to Be Wild

Some people think nothing of sacrificing personal comfort.

You get halfway round the side and the rain starts.

They laugh in the face of adversity.

Their dedication is second to none.

You're probably not giving herself indoors as much time and attention as she'd like.

They do it for love, not money.

Four amateur naturalists, four creatures,...

I'll have to chase after it.

..four inspiring stories.

Britain's amateur naturalists have studied butterflies for centuries,

but where the Victorians caught and pinned them,

our modern-day enthusiasts have a different relationship with them.

Butterflies have been called aerial flowers.

They are colourful mascots of the British summer.

They can be found fluttering all over the countryside,

but they're far more than vibrant fripperies.

They are a vital part of the food chain.

A single blue tit needs to catch 500 caterpillars a day for its family.

If there is something wrong with our British countryside,

butterflies are amongst the first to react.

Studying them takes passion, dedication and patience.

There's far more to butterflies than you might think.

Bill Shrieves is out on a walk,

but this isn't any old relaxed stroll in the countryside.

His walks have rules.

Lots of rules.

They need to imagine themselves in a five-metre-square box.

You must only count the butterflies inside that box.

You must put out a thermometer.

Record a percentage of sunshine,

also the wind speed.

Before I start the walk, I must remember to take my thermometer and

put it in the shade to measure the temperature.

Also I have to remember to pick it up at the end.

I've lost a lot of thermometers that way.

Sticking by the rules means that these walks are highly scientific

and so can measure the ups and downs of British butterflies.

In many ways, butterflies are like the miners' canaries.

A lot of effort is put into studying birds, but birds react

much more slowly to ecological and manmade changes than butterflies do.

Largely because butterflies are at the bottom end of the food chain.

Birds eat caterpillars,

and so, butterflies are the first to show that all is not well.

Bill is part of what he jokingly calls a Dads' Army of walkers across Britain.

Their results are fed back to Butterfly Conservation headquarters in Dorset.

They show how butterfly numbers are changing and that many species are in decline.

Here's my first butterfly to go down on the list.

That's an Adonis Blue and another one there.

So that's two dots to put down.

Adonis Blue, quite the best blue butterfly.

It's this beautiful greenish-blue colour with thick white fringes

of little black kind of subtraction signs crossing them, quite majestic.

An absolute dream of a butterfly.

There's another one here. Was it the same one?

Goodness knows, but I'm going to take another one down anyway.

So that gives us a count of four so far.

We've hardly gone any distance at all.

Two down there, look, side by side.

And another three, and another female.

This is beginning to look good.

Oh, there's a female. Lovely.

Bill's interest in butterflies goes right back to childhood when

he was allowed to keep his bedroom light on at night to attract moths.

You always need a kind of eureka factor which gets you going

and one night, about midnight,

a giant moth swooped in and when it was finally identified,

it turned out to be a moth called the bedstraw hawk-moth which had barely

been seen in Dorset and that got some of the more professional entomologists interested.

The enthusiastic school boy became a history teacher.

Now he's retired, he's teaching people how to butterfly walk,

passing on his passion to dozens more walkers.

So why do they all do it?

If you talk to people, I think by far the most important reason is the

feeling that they're getting kind of back in touch with the natural world.

There's always something happens, a roe deer will suddenly break cover

or you'll see a stoat

and it just keeps you in touch with all that kind of thing.

I wonder if they mind having such a big audience. Apparently not.

On top of that, there's now a huge buzz factor that the data is not

just of local significance, it's of global significance.

This is late May and this is really very exceptional

because usually in late May,

these Adonis Blues are not out yet

and this is typical of what butterfly walkers are finding all over the country,

that the season is starting earlier and earlier.

Bill has noticed plenty of changes since he started studying butterflies,

not least the number of species that have been lost.

The one which particularly upsets me is the pearl-bordered fritillary

because when I was a kid, most woodlands had pearl-bordered fritillaries

and to think that there's not a single wood in Dorset where the butterfly still flies,

it's kind of like your whole idea of spring and early summer

has just kind of turned on its head.

And I find it really quite painful there,

which is a slightly silly thing to say, but it seems a terrible loss.

Like a lot of other creatures, the pearl-bordered fritillary

has suffered from loss of the right type of woodland.

The remaining butterflies are monitored by Bill and his friends.

Butterfly walks are really taking off

and not just in Dorset.

Walking has now spread out of Britain,

first of all into Belgium and Holland, who have got the most to lose with global warming,

with rising sea levels, so they need really good indicators of what's happening.

And amazingly, walking is going on all over the world

and at this very minute, there's probably someone out in the Gambia

doing a butterfly walk, using exactly the same procedures as I am here.

Bill's afternoon strolls have snowballed.

The volunteers are all doing their bit to help butterflies.

They have discovered that whilst some British species are doing well, others are in desperate straits.

Whilst Bill's busy with the big picture,

one man in Cornwall has his sights set on one butterfly in particular.

Barry Offield has been painting butterflies of all kinds for years.

But recently he's turned his hand to another kind of reproduction -

lovingly growing heath fritillary butterflies in his greenhouse.

Right, here's the caterpillars.

This one is about three quarters grown.

He's obviously still looking for food.

This is one of the slower ones.

Why that happens, I really don't know.

I suppose it's like people.

Some get big and some stay small.

The greenhouse at this present time has larvae still feeding.

It has pupae and it has living butterflies.

One's emerged from the chrysalis.

He's just climbing up that leaf.

So we've now got seven.

Barry's devotion to the butterflies is all part of a larger plan

to save the heath fritillary in the Tamar Valley.

With the demise of traditional woodland management,

the heath fritillary got into a near terminal tailspin.

By 2001, it was teetering on the brink.

Early May and nearly all of Barry's caterpillars have now blossomed into butterflies.

Today, you won't believe it, in this weather, we're going

to go and take the butterflies to Blanchdown Wood,

where we're going to release them into the wild.

The reason we have to do it is because we don't want to continue keeping them in captivity.

So, despite the weather, which is awful, we have to go and release them today.

Time to transfer them, ready for release

and Barry's come up with a novel way of doing this.

A good method of taking them out of there without handling them

is to cut the stems of the flowers

and stick it in the oasis.

Twelve.

Just let those go.

And there's the 100th.

So he gets a prize.

Barry meets Caroline Bulman of Butterfly Conservation

at the chosen release site, Blanchdown Wood.

I'm going to open the cage and, hopefully, release them,

but I don't think they're going to fly because it's cold and it's wet.

So we'll have to just see what happens.

There we are.

Heath fritillary butterflies in the Tamar Valley crashed

from a population of thousands to just a handful by 2001.

Barry's hope is that releases like this will help return them to their former glory.

When they've finished, I think they're over there.

It's a long way down there.

Yeah, that's the last one gone.

It's disappointing, because had it been a fine day,

-these would be flying around here enjoying themselves, wouldn't they, Caroline?

-Yes.

And we won't know until next year if this one's been successful,

but we hope it will be.

It is terrific that people have done all this work for a butterfly.

We are a bit wet now.

'People do all sorts of things.'

Why do bird watchers watch birds?

Why do people fish?

Probably to catch it and eat it. We don't eat butterflies.

It's just a fascination that is developed in one's mind

and I'm doing a very small portion to put something back.

If I can get the heath fritillary re-established,

then I shall have achieved my objective.

Two years of Barry's tender ministrations

have re-established the butterflies at two Tamar Valley sites.

From near-extinction, they are now on their way back up.

It's easy to understand the lure of colourful butterflies.

Quintessential symbols of our British summer.

Their cousins, the moths, are far more tricky to study.

They're just as beautiful, but they're mostly nocturnal.

There are more species and they are harder to identify.

Mike Bailey in Somerset thinks they're well worth the extra effort.

In my garden, I ran a moth trap pretty well every night of the year.

I mean, if it's a really cold freezing winter night, I won't,

but generally, I run it most nights of the year.

This is what we normally do,

stand here and then as a moth comes in, we'll try and catch it.

They're actually looking and searching for mates.

Here's our first moth. This is a Brimstone moth, a yellow one.

On an extreme night,

it could be in the thousands, and with a hundred-odd species,

an uncomfortable number of moths.

but on a typical night, you would get sort of 200 moths.

This one is called a square spot rustic.

We use this sheet to paint our shed,

so all these brown splodges are sometimes mistaken for moths.

Not exactly buzzing, is it?

Dusky thorn fluttering his wings, he'll probably take off soon.

There we are. There you go. He's gone.

There's a large yellow underwing.

I shall obviously leave this trap running overnight

and presumably, there'll be moths coming in until dawn.

I've never stayed up overnight,

but I'm sure there are some of my friends that have.

Mike's off to bed, leaving his moth trap to chug away overnight.

Catching moths in his back garden is a far cry from his London childhood,

but the love of nature was always there.

When we were growing up in west London, in Acton,

it wasn't really a very wildlife-friendly place,

but if you were taken to see a relative or something, there'd be that obligatory

five minutes when they asked you about yourself and you'd say, oh, yes, birds were your interest.

I had friends that were also interested in birds and we used to, whenever we could, get the Tube

or cycle out to edge of London and go for country walks.

For the last 20 years, Mike has developed a fascination with moths.

Studying them for so long has revealed some interesting trends.

You do see that there's a change

and it happens in various ways.

There's some moths which you actually see their numbers going up and down in cycles.

Then there's others, like the migrants, that suddenly one year you get a phenomenal number of them

and then the next year, you hardly see them at all.

There are only 57 species of British butterfly

and they're easy to identify.

But there are 2,500 species of moth.

These large ones, these are all the large yellow underwing.

Visually, there's quite a few hundred of the large ones

that you get to know.

This is the angle shade, shuttle-shaped dart and a green carpet.

The willow beauty.

That's disappeared up into your camera lens as well.

Get rid of him.

That's it. He's gone.

Quite often, it's a matter of getting the moth and the book and comparing the moth with the illustration.

HE COUNTS

Thirteen.

When you really can't identify one, there's only one way forward.

You have to reveal the moth's genitals.

So Mike's taught himself to do painstaking dissection work by microscope.

What I'm doing, I'm taking the skin away, using forceps

until I've got the claspers at the end.

It's not something I feel happy about doing,

but it's the only way of actually recording the data.

So it's with a bit of a heavy heart that I have killed some moths and dissected them.

It's a matter of looking at this and then comparing it with the illustration here

to see which one it is and the one that it matches is this one,

which is the cloaked minor, here.

So what does Mike's wife think about the amount of time he spends with moths?

Inevitably, if you've got some active interest, then you know, you're probably

not giving herself indoors as much time and attention as she'd like.

But at least Mrs Mike isn't being neglected in vain.

Her husband's work will be used in the first-ever

Comprehensive Guide to the Moths of the Greater Bristol Area.

There's a team of us, a sort of an editorial panel that have written it all.

So it will represent hundreds of man hours of work.

Mike's even doing the illustrations.

Yes, really, one can get sort of quite carried away in just happily

sitting here putting in your dots and making up the darker bits.

I actually do them quite large so that they can be reduced.

So you're actually not sort of drawing an actual size.

You're doing it ten times life size,

but that's thousands of little dots to make a black area,

but it seems to give the sort of texture that I like.

The atlas follows on from a series and so there's already

a Flora of the Bristol Region and the Butterflies of the Bristol Region.

So this is the next one in the series.

-When's it going to be finished?

-Well!

It's a bit of a joke, really.

We always say next year, but, I mean, we're hoping it will be out in 2008.

The end of the atlas won't be the end of Mike and moths.

He's hooked for life.

So what does it take to be a moth fanatic?

I think you do need to be the sort of person who likes to apply yourself and probably, you know,

the sort of person who likes to get a list and keep a record.

It's very much a boy thing, I think.

Long-term studies like Mike's keep a finger on the pulse of British moths.

These unassuming creatures play an important role

as pollinators and as fast food.

Moths have declined by 40% in the last 40 years.

A drop in numbers that is already having an effect on bats.

Over the same time,

British butterflies have declined by nearly 80%.

Many have been affected by loss of habitat.

If where you live changes, you have to adapt or die.

Sometimes, though, habitats can be rescued in the nick of time

and then the butterflies can flutter back.

Andy Barker has been getting his hands dirty

getting the landscape just right for one butterfly.

It's just such an exquisite colour to see in a countryside otherwise green and browns.

So to see the blues, it's such a special thing to see.

Today, Magdalen Hill Down is one of the best places in Britain for the rare Chalk Hill Blue butterfly.

20 years ago, it was a very different story.

It had almost disappeared from here altogether.

The Down was being strangled by uncontrolled scrub.

In 1989, Butterfly Conservation took over the site

and Andy joined the volunteer army to save the Chalk Hill Blue.

This slide gives a very good impression of the extent of the scrub.

This eastern half had been cleared, whereas you can see the western half is very densely covered with scrub.

So the Chalk Hill Blue which really likes short grassland

wouldn't have enjoyed that situation at all, so we got there just in time.

And this is just in the early days, with a few of the volunteers,

the sheep seem quite interested to see what we're up to.

Their hard graft has let the butterflies make an impressive comeback.

Andy's off and out to check on them.

Putting your foot down a rabbit hole, I think, is one of the things you need to guard against.

Here's a Chalk Hill Blue.

And here's another.

This is absolutely pristine condition with the dark edge. Really nice.

The sun's just coming out now, this is nice, because there's quite a few now.

Here we have the female Chalk Hill Blue.

It's the same sort of size as the male, but brown.

On a cool day, you can just gently put your finger in front of a butterfly and it will often crawl on,

because your own body temperature is nice and warm and they'll open their wings.

See, like this one's doing here, because they'll find, oh, well,

that's a nice warm surface, I'll sit here.

I always like doing this.

You sort of feel the butterfly's quite happy in your company and that they'll happily sit there for ages.

There you go, she's opening again.

It's a lovely thing to do, actually. When you show children how this works, they love it.

Oop! There she goes, she's flying.

It was as a child himself that his passion for nature was kindled.

Like many amateur naturalists,

Andy was out exploring wildlife from a young age.

His early experiences growing up on a farm have shaped his adult life.

Been born and brought up on the farm, we were just in the countryside all the time and so you just were

very keen and observing things as all children are, very inquisitive about what's around them.

We would just see loads of Ringlets and Meadow Browns and Common Blues

but as a boy, I think you just remember the great years when you just saw loads

and it was always the summer holidays when you saw most

and of course, it was sunny all the time, as far as you remember.

Well, this is the more typical weather

that we get when we're trying to do the monitoring of the butterflies.

You find it's a sort of bright sunny day and then by the time you've driven to

the site, the clouds have started to appear and then you get halfway round the site and the rain starts.

Hopefully we'll still get some brightness.

We've been really lucky now.

The rain's just eased

and there's a mating pair of Chalk Hill Blue,

so this rain has only been slight

and they're able to go about their business as normal.

You can see, here's the two

and the female's the one on the right.

Can you see how brown she is on the underside?

Hopefully, they've been successful

and she'll keep the population of Chalk Hill Blues going for next year.

This is what it's all about for Andy and his compatriots.

Thanks to their hard work, the butterflies have gone forth and multiplied.

When we did the first year of regular monitoring, the total for a series of weeks was 300.

Whereas now, for the same route that we take and for the same period,

you get about 3,600 in a year, so it's more than a tenfold increase.

I mean, it's exceeded our expectations and we've been very pleased and proud that it has

worked out so well, but I don't think anybody could

have wished for more and it's great to see them doing well.

Andy has devoted thousands of hours to his passion for butterflies.

By getting the habitat just right,

he has helped bring Chalk Hill MagdalenBlues back to Hill Down.

Barry, Bill, Andy and Mike are all doing their own bit in their own way

to help British butterflies and moths.

Through the work of our amateur naturalists and others like them, more is known about butterflies

and moths in Britain than anywhere else in the world.

If you want to find out more about getting involved with butterflies and moths,

go onto bbc.co.uk/nature.

Next time on Born To Be Wild, one man scales the heights.

Some people say I'm a bit like a mountain goat.

Another dives into the depths.

A couple spend hours on a windy cliff top

and one man is rallying his whole community.

We'll probably go in the house and they'll be jumping around like anything.

Join our amateur naturalists as they watch over the coasts of Britain.

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