Following the press release from Butterfly Conservation HQ, suggesting the Large Tortoiseshell may be going to be counted as a UK species again, we have been looking at our data.
These are the statistics from Dorset over the years:-
| Year | Number Seen |
| 1969 | 1 |
| 1979 | 1 |
| 1980 | 1 |
| 1981 | 1 |
| 1983 | 3 |
| 1984 | 1 |
| 1987 | 1 |
| 1997 | 1 |
| 2006 | 5 |
| 2007 | 20 |
| 2008 | 12 |
| 2009 | 1 |
| 2011 | 1 |
| 2013 | 3 |
| 2018 | 5 |
| 2019 | 7 |
| 2020 | 63 |
| 2021 | 24 |
| 2022 | 5 |
| 2023 | 3 |
| 2025 | 2 |
Not all of these are necessarily going to be breeding here, they can be individual migrants or releases (which distort our figures so we can’t tell how they are truly doing), but we’re pleased to see them anyway!