One amazing piece of news from the folk who did the butterfly monitoring walk on Fontmell Down (North Dorset) in the first week of July, was that they saw 112 Dark Green Fritillaries!
There were actually few parts of the walk without these magnificent freshly-emerged Fritillaries being spotted.
To put this in context, the highest previous counts for these butterflies for all 26 walks in the whole year were 80 in 1986, and 109 in 2012.
Dorset Branch Records Officer, Bill Shreeves said:
How this has happened is beyond me at present. Obviously they must have had a good platform from last year to build on, but the 2012 – early 2013 weather was hardly very helpful to the overwintering caterpillars! Count numbers have also been quite high for the adjoining walk at Clubmens Down.
Only one Dark Green has so far been reported to this website, so we’d be very interested in hearing of any seen away from the transect (butterfly monitoring) walks – enter them on our sightings form, or e-mail [email protected].