The Surrey Small Blue Project: Update By Project Officer, Fiona Haynes.
Staff and volunteers at the charity Butterfly Conservation are getting excited for the emergence of a particular butterfly in Surrey this year, the Small Blue or Cupido minimus.
This species has been on the decline in Surrey for many years, in part due to a lack of its sole food plant, Kidney Vetch. Since 2017, Butterfly Conservation has been running a ‘Surrey Small Blue Project’, working on lots of different sites across the North Downs between Guildford and Dorking to try and encourage populations of the butterfly to spread back to their former range.
The Small Blue is present at a few sites around Guildford including Pewley Down, and at Box Hill, but there is a large gap between. By creating lots of suitable patches of habitat, the butterfly should be able to disperse.
More than 150 bare chalk scrapes have been created on chalk grassland sites by removal of the grasses and topsoil. These have been created using a digger on some sites, but the majority have been created by volunteers using spades. They’ve all had Kidney Vetch seed sown into them and many now have plenty of seedlings coming up in them.
This is an exciting time in the project as the habitat is starting to become more suitable for the butterfly. Small Blues usually start to emerge in mid- May and can be found until the end of June.
They are Britain’s smallest butterfly and are similar to Holly Blues in appearance. They are monitored closely on their remaining sites, but we will be keeping a very close eye on the project sites in future years, and hoping to see them colonise new areas.
The project has been a real success so far. We’ve been working closely with the National Trust, Guildford Borough Council, Surrey Wildlife Trust, the Albury Estate and private landowners such as Denbies Vineyard and the Rosamund Trust Community Garden, to help improve these amazing chalk grassland sites for a whole range of wildlife.
We’ve got a core group of volunteers for Butterfly Conservation Surrey and SW London and we’ve also been working with volunteers and staff from our partner organisations.
We usually have a weekly volunteer task or survey event going on, so do get in touch if you’re interested. We also have a Facebook Group called ‘Small Blues in Surrey’ if you want to see a taster of what we’re up to.
May and June are a fabulous time for getting out onto the Downs and looking for butterflies. Butterflies like sunny conditions so if the weather is lovely, what could be better than getting out for a walk and enjoying some birdsong and butterflies.
Green Hairstreaks, Grizzled Skippers and Dingy Skippers are among the species already out, and sightings can be recorded either using the traditional pen, paper and Ordnance Survey grid reference method, or online using the i-record website, or for those with smartphones the free i-record butterflies phone app.
The project is also helping some other rarities such as the Adonis Blue, the Silver-spotted Skipper and Grizzled and Dingy Skippers. Any sightings of these species would also be really useful so that we can build a better idea of how these species are faring.
You can get involved in the project in many ways – attend a survey event, volunteer for practical habitat management events, or if you have land or a garden in the area, consider whether you would be able to do some wildlife gardening for butterflies.
You could create a wildflower area and even include Kidney Vetch!
Get in touch with me for more information and happy butterfly-spotting!
Fiona Haynes, Butterfly Conservation