We had a great day today visiting Old Sulehay and Stonepit Close sites to see the work done by the Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Northamptonshire Wildlife Trust (BCN Wildlife Trust) to encourage butterflies, namely the Grizzled and Dingy Skipper, with hope one day our Chequered Skipper will make the jump to this site too.
Stonepit Close is an important disused quarry site, providing valuable early successional habitats. Such habitats are popular with Grizzled and Dingy Skippers, as they offer bare ground for basking and ideal conditions for their main caterpillar foodplants to grow. Work by the BCN Wildlife Trust creating scrapes and maintaining bare ground has ensured the continued abundance of Wild Strawberry and Bird’s Foot Trefoil for Grizzled and Dingy Skippers respectively. These skippers love to lay eggs on plants in exposed and warm spots – which of course there are no shortage of exposed warm spots in open quarry sites like Stonepit (especially on a sunny day)!
We also saw the versatile and hardy little plant, the Common Primrose, providing nectar and camouflage to one of our early spring emergers, the Brimstone butterfly. Did you know that the yellow colouring of the Brimstone butterfly is said to have inspired the name for these flying insects, ‘butter’-fly! Also the Primrose is also one of the earliest flowers to appear in the UK, and can be seen from as early as December sometimes - hint in the name, ‘prima-rose’, prima being the Latin for first.
