Volunteers from Butterfly Conservation are continuing their sterling work surveying and monitoring for the brown hairstreak butterfly in the county. Building on a number of years’ survey work egg and habitat surveys of new sites continued with 154 eggs and 15,780 m of good condition habitat being newly identified.

These new finds are excellent but when looking at the annual transect surveys results were significantly down on 2007 and previous years, which probably reflects the poor summer weather in 2007.

Eighty volunteer days were carried out during the 2007/08 survey season, which included undertaking management of scrub at four key sites to improve the habitat for the butterfly.

Work has expanded from just survey and habitat management and last year time was put into sending letters to landowners giving management advice and suggestions re hedges in two important areas: Llanarthne – where the population may have become extinct and at Halfway – where an important new population was found. In addition a BC proposal was sent to WAG recommending limiting the frequency of hedge flailing under all WAG financial for agriculture, including cross compliance and agri-environment schemes.

Good management practice for brown hairstreak habitat should include:

• sites where where it is practical to avoid nibbling by livestock,
• a 5-year rotation of scrub cutting,
• a 3- or 4-year rotation or hedge flailing,
• coppicing blackthorn to near ground level (and preventing stock access).

For 2009 further gaps in potential distribution in northern Carmarthenshire will be investigated. Within other areas of the county where there are any gaps in the survey record of suitable habitat, individual volunteers are encouraged to search for eggs to fill the gaps (see November 2008 newsletter).

The efforts of the Butterfly Conservation volunteers has to be commended. The work of these volunteers, led by Richard Smith (who works extremely hard to organise the survey days, analyse the data and produce the reports) has been the reason that  we now know as much about the distribution and ecology of this rare species and shows how important volunteer effort can be in conservation.