The Comma • Autumn 2011 - Butterfly Conservation

Magic moment: Mike Williams and Trevor Bucknall release the first batch of butterflies (John Tilt)
Pearl-bordered Fritillaries:
Back from the brink
By Trevor Bucknall
In May 2010 John Tilt and I met up with Mike
Williams and Nick Greatorex Davis in the Wyre
Forest on the railway line. The objective was to
capture adult Pearl-bordered Fritillaries for a
captive breeding programme for a later release into
Grafton Wood.
To do so legitimately is a long process, to get the
permission of all parties involved, the funding,
surveys and feasibility studies. It took about 10 years
to get to this stage!
We were only allowed to take up to 10% of the
adults we saw. Fortunately, the weather was fine and
we saw around 200 adults. We took a dozen adults,
which Nick deemed was more than enough, from the
railway line and the Elan Valley pipeline to try to
4 The Comma • Autumn 2011
ensure a broader gene
pool. Nick then took
them home in his cool
bag to mate them,
although he suggested
we probably didn’t
need the males as the Larva about to pupate
females had probably already been mated.
The subsequent news was good in that we had
hundreds of larvae. In late July I took over some of
the stock from Nick as he wasn’t sure he would be
able to find enough violets to feed them all.
Fortunately, quite soon afterwards, they went into
hibernation, and were left to overwinter against a
north-facing wall in the lee of the house to give some
shelter from the worst of the rain. The cold is not an
issue.