If you saw the episode of David Attenborough’s Wild Isles on 26 March, you will have seen one of our Butterfly Reserves. Lankham Bottom is north of Dorchester and is grassland which has been protected from agricultural “improvement”. As well as the work our volunteers do to maintain its habitat, there is a lot of grazing by rabbits, and it is the rabbits who featured in Wild Isles – apparently we have the largest rabbit warren in the country!

Even with this input, there is still a need for human intervention, and one task is to keep removing the ragwort. This is done by volunteers, and to give you an idea of the scale of the task, these picture show the team at work, followed by the ragwort heap they collected.

Volunteers collecting up the ragwort at Lankham in July 2022. Photo: Nigel Spring

This year’s ragwort pile at Lankham Bottom. Photo: Nigel Spring

Butterfly species to be seen here (at the right time of year) are the Adonis Blue, the Brown Argus, Dingy and Grizzled Skipper, Marsh Fritillary and Small Heath. 80 moth species have been recorded here.

Dingy Skippers. Photo: Shona Refoy

The land belongs to Wessex Water, and is a water catchment for the local public water supply. It is open access land, but if you go to explore it, please keep your dogs on a lead: we are coming into bird nesting time, and some birds nest on the ground.

Further information can be found on the Lankham Bottom page of our website and the Lankham page on the website of the national Butterfly Conservation.