Category Archives: Butterflies

Pollinators need more space and 10% habitat is not enough says a new study just published in Science

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Pollinators such as wild bees, butterflies, and hoverflies are in trouble worldwide. A major new study, published in Science and led by Gabriella Bishop and other scientists at Wageningen University & Research, shows that the oft-quoted figure of 10% semi-natural habitat in farmland landscapes is far too little to safeguard pollinators. Instead, the evidence points to a need for somewhere between 16% and 37% habitat cover, depending on the type of pollinator, if we are serious about halting declines. Suitable habitats include hedgerows, patches of woodland, species-rich grasslands, and flowering margins, and as a general rule, hoverflies need less of it whilst bumblebees and butterflies require more.

I was fortunate to play a part in this global assessment, contributing an unpublished dataset collected with my former PhD student, Sam Tarrant, who studied plant-pollinator interactions on restored landfill and established grassland sites. Seeing those data joined with dozens of other studies from around the world underlines something we have known for years: no single dataset, however carefully gathered, can give us the whole picture. To really understand what is happening to biodiversity—and to design conservation solutions that work—we need these kinds of global, mega-author syntheses that draw together evidence from many landscapes, taxa, and approaches.

The message from this analysis is stark but hopeful. More habitat means more pollinators, across all groups. Richer habitats with abundant flowers give an additional boost, but the overriding priority must be to increase the sheer area of natural habitat in farmed landscapes. Small-scale fixes like wildflower strips offer short-term benefits, but without enough space they can’t deliver recovery at scale. Long-term, secure habitat creation—on the order of decades, not seasons—is what pollinators, farmers, and ecosystems need.

Although the policy debate in Europe provided the backdrop for this study, the lessons (and the data) are global. Wherever agriculture dominates, the health of pollinator populations—and by extension our food security and biodiversity—depends on our willingness to give these insects the space and quality of habitat they require.

Looking ahead, we need to think bigger and work together. That means more international collaborations, more sharing of data, and more commitment to long-term solutions that transcend borders. The image at the start of this post is from my trip back to China in July this year. I deliberately chose it because, as you’ll see from the map below which is taken from the paper, there was no suitable data available for the study from that country. Or from Africa. Or Australasia. Or from most of tropical South America. That shows that as pollination ecologists we need to coordinate more in advance on these types of syntheses, and maximise the value of the kinds of data that we collect. The main take away from this study, however, is that if we want to reverse the declines in biodiversity, scientists, policymakers, businesses, farmers, and citizens all have a role to play. Pollinators remind us that nature is interconnected and global—our conservation efforts must be, too.

Here’s the full reference with a link to the study:

Bishop, G.A., Kleijn, D., Albrecht, M., Bartomeus, I., Isaacs, R., Kremen, C., Magrach, A., Ponisio, L.C., Potts, S.G., Scheper, J., Smith, H.G., Tscharntke, T., Albrecht, J., Badenhausser, I., Åström, J., Báldi, A., Basu, P., Berggren, N., Beyer, N., Blüthgen, R., Bommarco, B.J., Brosi, H., Cohen, L.J., Cole, K.R., Denning, M., Devoto, J., Ekroos, F., Fornoff, B.L., Foster, M.A.K., Gillespie, J.L., Gonzalez-Andujar, J.P., González-Varo, J.P., Goulson, D., Grass, I., Hass, A.L., Herrera, J.M., Holzschuh, A., Hopfenmüller, S., Izquierdo, J., Jauker, B., Kallioniemi, E.P., Kirsch, F., Klein, A.-M., Kovács-Hostyánszki, A., Krauss, J., Krimmer, E., Kunin, B., Laha, S.A.M., Lindström, Y., Mandelik, G., Marcacci, D.I., McCracken, M., Monasterolo, L.A., Morandin, J., Morrison, S., Mudri Stojnic, J., Ollerton, J., Persson, A.S., Phillips, B.B., Piko, J.I., Power, E.F., Quinlan, G.M., Rundlöf, M., Raderschall, C.A., Riggi, L.G.A., Roberts, S.P.M., Roth, T., Senapathi, D., Stanley, D.A., Steffan-Dewenter, I., Stout, J.C., Sutter, L., Tanis, M.F., Tarrant, S., van Kolfschoten, L., Vanbergen, A.J., Vilà, M., von Königslöw, V., Vujic, A., WallisDeVries, M.F., Wen, A., Westphal, C., Wickens, J.B., Wickens, V.J., Wilkinson, N.I., Wood, T.J., Fijen, T.P.M. (2025) Critical habitat thresholds for effective pollinator conservation in agricultural landscapes. Science 389: 1314-1319

Here’s the abstract:

Biodiversity in human-dominated landscapes is declining, but evidence-based conservation targets to guide international policies for such landscapes are lacking. We present a framework for informing habitat conservation policies based on the enhancement of habitat quantity and quality and define thresholds of habitat quantity at which it becomes effective to also prioritize habitat quality. We applied this framework to insect pollinators, an important part 5 of agroecosystem biodiversity, by synthesizing 59 studies from 19 countries. Given low habitat quality, hoverflies had the lowest threshold at 6% semi-natural habitat cover, followed by solitary bees (16%), bumble bees (18%), and butterflies (37%). These figures represent minimum habitat thresholds in agricultural landscapes, but when habitat quantity is restricted, marked increases in quality are required to reach similar outcomes.

Surveying for Pollinators: join me for an online live webinar on 2nd October!

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On Thursday, October 2 at 6:30pm, I’m running an online webinar on the theme of Surveying for Pollinators. Follow that link for more details and to book a ticket.

Here’s an overview of what I’ll be covering:

Pollinators like bees, butterflies, hoverflies and even beetles play a vital role in keeping our ecosystems thriving. They help plants reproduce, support biodiversity, boost food production, and contribute billions to the global economy. Beyond their ecological importance, they’re also excellent indicators of environmental health — when pollinators are doing well, nature usually is too.

But how do we actually find out what’s happening with pollinators?

In this webinar, we’ll explore the fascinating world of pollinator surveys — from simple, hands-on methods anyone can try, to more advanced techniques used by experienced entomologists and ecologists. You’ll get an overview of popular approaches, including:

  • Flower-Insect Timed Counts – A quick and accessible method inspired by the UK Pollinator Monitoring Scheme (PoMS).
  • Transect Walks – Great for spotting pollinators along a fixed route and comparing habitats.
  • Plant-focused sampling – for when you really want to delve deep into the pollinators of a species.
  • Trapping methods – including pan traps, vane traps, Malaise traps, and moth traps.
  • Camera Traps – A non-intrusive way to capture who’s visiting flowers when you’re not looking.

We’ll break down the pros and cons of each technique, which approaches are best suited to the question being asked, what to consider before starting your own survey, and how your efforts can feed into national monitoring schemes like PoMS, the UK Butterfly Monitoring Scheme, and BeeWalk.

Whether you’re a curious beginner, a budding citizen scientist, a research student, or a conservation professional, this session will give you the knowledge and tools to design a pollinator survey that fits your goals — and helps protect the buzz behind biodiversity.

The 90-minute event will consist of a 1-hour presentation followed by a Q&A with the tutor using questions provided by the live audience.

The presentations will be recorded and shared with those who booked, alongside Q&A transcripts and relevant links following the event via a password-protected website.

Evolutionary implications of a deep-time perspective on insect pollination – a new review just published

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When we think of pollination, we often picture bees buzzing around flowers or butterflies flitting from bloom to bloom. This relationship between plants and pollinators is one of the most well-known interactions in nature. But insect pollination didn’t begin with the colorful flowers we see today. In fact, pollinators were at work millions of years before flowering plants (angiosperms) even existed. In a new review led by Spanish researchers David Peris and Ricardo Pérez-de la Fuente, to which I added a modern ecological perspective, we explored this topic and why it’s relevant to our current understanding of plant-pollinator relationships.

Despite centuries of research on pollination, the fossil record of pollinating insects has only gained serious attention in the past few decades. What palaeontologists have uncovered is reshaping our understanding of pollination’s origins. It turns out that insects were pollinating plants long before flowers evolved—playing a crucial role in the reproduction of ancient gymnosperms, the group of seed-producing plants that includes conifers, cycads, and ginkgos.

Most people assume that insect pollination began with flowering plants, but the evidence tells a different story. Fossilised insects with specialised body structures for carrying pollen—such as hairy bodies or mouthparts adapted for nectar-feeding—have been found in deposits dating back hundreds of millions of years. These early pollinators likely visited gymnosperms, helping them reproduce in a world that looked vastly different from today’s landscapes.

Ancient pollination was driven by a diverse range of insects, many of which are now extinct. The fossil record reveals that various insect groups—including beetles, flies, wasps, and even some long-lost relatives of modern lacewings—were already acting as pollinators long before the first flower bloomed. This means that pollination as an ecological process has far deeper evolutionary roots than many realise.

As plants evolved, so did their pollinators. The rise of flowering plants during the Cretaceous period (around 100 million years ago) transformed pollination systems, leading to the incredible diversity of plant-pollinator relationships we see today. Many of the insect groups that once dominated pollination in prehistoric times have since declined or disappeared, replaced by the bees, butterflies, and other familiar pollinators that thrive in modern ecosystems.

Understanding this long history is essential—not just for scientists, but for anyone interested in biodiversity and conservation. When we focus only on present-day pollinators and plants, we miss a crucial part of the story. The fossil record helps us see how pollination has changed over time, which in turn can offer insights into how today’s ecosystems might respond to environmental pressures such as climate change and habitat loss.

Recognising the ancient history of insect pollination isn’t just an academic exercise—it has real-world implications. If we understand how pollination evolved and adapted to past environmental changes, we can better predict how it might shift in the future. Conservation efforts that aim to protect pollinators today can benefit from a long-term perspective, ensuring that we’re not just responding to recent trends but also considering deep-time ecological processes.

So the next time you see a bee visiting a flower, remember—you’re witnessing the latest chapter in a story that began hundreds of millions of years ago. The relationship between plants and pollinators is far older, more complex, and more fascinating than we ever imagined.

Here’s the reference with a link to the paper. It should be open access, but if you have problems obtaining it, send me a message via my Contact page:

Peris, D., Ollerton, J., Sauquet, H., Hidalgo, O., Peñalver, E., Magrach, A., Álvarez-Parra, S., Peña-Kairath, C., Condamine, F.L., Delclòs, X. & Pérez-de la Fuente, R. (2025) Evolutionary implications of a deep-time perspective on insect pollination. Biological Reviews (in press)

What is happening to wild bees in Britain?

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Recently the Bumblebee Conservation Trust (BCT) reported that, in 2024, British bumblebees experienced their worst year since the BCT started its monitoring campaign. Overall, the numbers of bees were down by more than one fifth, with one of our commonest species, the Red-tailed Bumblebee (Bombus lapidarius) declining a staggering 74%! The cause seems to be the cold, wet spring of 2024 and we have to hope that this is a blip that will not be repeated in 2025. So far the year has been cold and I didn’t see my first queen bumblebee flying until early March. But the very warm weather over the last few days has encouraged bumblebees out of hibernation and plants to start flowering.

Long-term monitoring of the type that the BCT undertakes with its volunteers, is vital if we are to understand how British pollinators are faring. When I compiled the evidence for the chapter entitled ‘The shifting fates of pollinators’ in my book Pollinators & Pollination: Nature and Society, I tried to give a global overview, but also focused on British records, which are probably the best long-term data that is available on trends in pollinators. This information is compiled by the Joint Nature Conservation Committee (JNCC) as part of its annual UK Biodiversity Indicators reports. Each year it produces an indicator showing trends in bees, hoverflies, and the two combined as an overall pollinator trend*. To quote the JNCC website:

The indicator is based on 394 species (158 species of bee and 236 species of hoverfly), and measures change in the number of 1 kilometre grid squares across the UK in which they were recorded in any given year: this is referred to as the ‘occupancy index’.

The bee data comes from the Bees, Wasps and Ants Recording Society (BWARS) and the graph of bee trends that I used in that chapter of my book assessed records up until 2017. It looked like this:

As you can see, the index fluctuated a bit but was on average fairly stable up until 2005, after which there was a sharp decline, then an uptick from about 2014, though still low compared to the 1980 baseline. The overall impression is that bees had a tough time from the early 2000s onward, but things seem to be improving.

Since my book came out in 2021 I’ve given a lot of talks to natural history societies, ran training with consultancies and local councils, and so forth. Each year I update the JNCC graphs in my talks to give the audience the latest information. This is the one I used last year, which took the data up to 2019**:

This looks a bit different – the fluctuations are more pronounced – but overall the trend is similar, though the drop after 2015 is worrying. The impression is that there’s been big (cyclical?) fluctuations in the bee index over time, but its generally always below the 1980 baseline.

Updating the story to 2022 (the most recent available) shows a very different picture:

The impression it gives is that there’s been some modest fluctuations in the bee index, but then from about 2013 onward, the index has massively improved and now wild bees are doing better than ever!

What’s happening here? Why are these three graphs – published over a period of about five years – giving such different impressions of what’s happening to wild bees in Britain? As far as I can tell there’s two main reasons for the changes. The first is that the number of bee species included in the index increased from 137 to 148 to 158. Adding species for which there was previously no or little data is clearly going to have an effect.

The second reason, perhaps more fundamental, is that the method used for calculating the index has been refined, as explained in the technical annex to the study. That’s important because the data underlying the bee index was never collected in a standardised way for the purposes of assessing species’ trends. For this reason the UK Pollinator Monitoring Scheme (PoMS) was developed and it’s interesting to see that the data in the latest PoMS report shows some stability in wild bee abundance from 2017 to 2022:

So the latest data suggests that, for once, there’s some good news in the world of British wildlife. Does this mean that we should be complacent about the state of our wild bees? Absolutely not! As always, the devil’s in the details. The BCT report that I cited at the start of this post provides one level of (worrying) detail. But another is provided by the JNCC’s own statistics. As well as showing the overall trend in the bee index, the analysis digs into what is happening for individual species and provides a helpful summary figure like this:

Clearly many species are doing well, or at least have not changed since the 1980s. But more than one quarter of British wild bees are showing a weak or strong decline over the long term. That’s a clear signal that we need to keep on with our efforts to support wildlife and enhance our strategies to improve the state of nature in Britain.

As always, feel free to comment on the post or get in touch via my Contact page.

My sincere thanks to all of the volunteer naturalists who collect the data used by JNCC and PoMS – the task of assessing trends in wildlife would be impossible without your commitment!

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*Why JNCC does not include butterflies – which are assessed separately – in this overall trend is unclear to me, as we know that they can be important pollinators for some plants – see my blog post: ‘Butterflies, bumblebees and hoverflies can be equally effective pollinators of some plants says a new study‘.

**The data in the JNCC report is always a couple of years behind the publication date.

Biodiversity Net Gain and pollinators: catch up with my talk on YouTube

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Yesterday I delivered a webinar for the Biological Recording Company on the topic of what Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) could mean for pollinator conservation. It’s a topic that clearly has a lot of resonance for the ecology community: almost one thousand people (994 to be precise) booked to attend, of which 380 actually watched. That’s a fairly typical ratio for free webinars, in my experience – many people book a place in the expectation that they will receive a link to watch the recording later.

The talk was indeed recorded and can be viewed by following this link to YouTube. There was a Q&A session afterwards which is not part of the recording but the questions and my answers have been transcribed and can be viewed on the Biological Recording Company’s blog, together with links to all of the references and data sources that I cited. Here’s the link to the blog.

I had a lot of really positive feedback during and after my talk, plus some extremely useful comments about where my interpretation of BNG was incorrect (or at least didn’t tell the whole story). As I stressed during my talk, BNG is a journey not an end point and we are all at the start of that journey! It’s going to be fascinating and important to see whether BNG can positively impact declining pollinator populations.

Biodiversity Net Gain and pollinators – join me for a FREE webinar next Monday!

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Biodiversity Net Gain is generating a lot of attention in the UK at the moment, some of it positive*:

“when designed and delivered well, BNG can secure benefits for nature, people and places, and for the economy”

“[BNG is] a game-changer for health and wellbeing”

And some of it extremely negative*:

“Biodiversity Net Gain is a lie but most people without enough ecological knowledge cannot see this & are fooled by the lie”

“[BNG is] a horrible legalistic contrivance, and it means nothing”

Regardless of how you feel about BNG, it’s here to stay, at least for the foreseeable future, and so we need to explore it and understand how (or whether) it can positively improve the state of nature in Britain.

Although I don’t pretend to be an expert on BNG**, I have thought a lot about how it might impact the group that I do have some expertise in, pollinators, and the implications for the pollination services that they provide to wild and crop plants.

Last October I produced a short report that considered the implications of BNG for insect pollinators – you can download a copy from the original blog post, though do be aware that some of the dates I mentioned were later revised by the then government and I have yet to revise the document.

As a follow up to this I have been invited by the Biological Recording Company to lead a one-hour webinar discussing this topic on Monday 28th October at 1pm. It’s free to attend and you can book a ticket by following this link. There’ll be a short presentation (30 minutes or so) followed by a live Q&A.

I hope that some of you can join me!

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*Real quotes, culled from reports and social media.

**Indeed, it’s such a new approach to development and nature conservation, can anybody consider themselves an expert?

What are the limits to pollinator diversity? A new article poses the question

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The most globally significant groups of pollinators are well known and have been studied for a long time: bees and wasps, flies, butterflies and moths, birds, bats and beetles are all familiar to those of us with an interest in pollination ecology. However, every few years a new type of pollinator or a novel pollination system is described from nature or from the fossil record, or we add further examples of previously neglected pollinator groups such as cockroaches.

This begs the question: how much is there still to discover? How close are we to describing the full diversity of animals that act as pollen vectors? Can looking at the past help us to predict what we might find in the future? That’s the topic of a Perspective article that I was invited to write for the special issue of the Journal of Applied Entomology on the theme of  The Neglected Pollinators that I mentioned last month. It’s a subject that I’ve thought about a lot over the last few decades and it was great to get an opportunity to air some ideas and speculation.

The article is open access and you can download a copy by following the link in this reference:

Ollerton, J. (2024) What are the phylogenetic limits to pollinator diversity? Journal of Applied Entomology (in press)

Here’s the abstract:

Although huge progress has been made over the past 200 years in identifying the diversity of pollinators of angiosperms and other plants, new discoveries continue to be made each year, especially in tropical areas and in the fossil record. In this perspective article I address the following questions: Just how diverse are the pollinators and what are the phylogenetic limits to that diversity? Which other groups of animals, not currently known to regularly engage with flowers, might be found to be pollinators in the future? Can we predict, from the fossil record and from discoveries in under-researched parts of the world, which animal groups might turn out in the future to contain pollinators? I also discuss why adding to our knowledge of plant–pollinator interactions is important, but also stress that an incomplete knowledge may not be a bad thing if it means that remote, inaccessible and relatively pristine parts of the world remain that way.

Butterflies, bumblebees and hoverflies can be equally effective pollinators of some plants says a new study

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Just after I arrived in Northampton in 1995, I set about looking for suitable local sites for conducting pollination ecology field work for myself and students. The campus on which we were situated at the time was adjacent to an urban park – Bradlaugh* Fields – parts of which were designated as local nature reserves. In the intervening years, data from that area have made their way into a wide range of published studies, including:

I still have data collected during that time that have never been published, but good data are hard won and they may see the light of day at some point. Case in point is that we’ve just published a paper based on data from Bradlaugh Fields, the first of which were collected in 2001!

In this paper we’ve tested how effective hoverflies, butterflies and bumblebees are at pollinating the flowers of a common generalist grassland plant, colloquially called Field Scabious (Knautia arvensis). The expectation was that bumblebees, being generally larger, hairier and more flower-focused than the other groups, would be the most effective at transferring pollen to stigmas. To our surprise, they were not: hoverflies and butterflies performed just as well! In fact we argue that butterflies may be MORE important as pollinators of this plant because they fly further distances between individual plants, rather than hopping between the inflorescences of the same plants, as bumblebees tend to do.

Crucially, the importance of these different groups of pollinators varies enormously as the relative abundance of the insects visiting the flowers differs between seasons. In some years butterflies dominate as pollinators, in other years bumblebees or hoverflies. This is driven, we think, both by fluctuations in the populations of these insects and by the availability of other, more preferred flowers that may bloom at the same time.

The paper is part of a special issue of the Journal of Applied Entomology devoted to The Neglected Pollinators. It’s open access and you can download a copy by following the link in this reference:

Ollerton, J., Coulthard, E., Tarrant, S., Woolford, J., Ré Jorge, L. & Rech, A.R. (2024) Butterflies, bumblebees and hoverflies are equally effective pollinators of Knautia arvensis (Caprifoliaceae), a generalist plant species with compound inflorescences. Journal of Applied Entomology (in press)

Here’s the abstract:

Plant-pollinator interactions exist along a continuum from complete specialisation to highly generalised, that may vary in time and space. A long-held assumption is that large bees are usually the most effective pollinators of generalist plants. We tested this by studying the relative importance of different groups of pollinators of Knautia arvensis (L.) Coult. (Caprifoliaceae: Dipsacoideae). This plant is suitable for such a study because it attracts a diversity of flower visitors, belonging to different functional groups. We asked whether all functional groups of pollinators are equally effective, or if one group is most effective, which has been documented in other species with apparently generalised pollination systems. We studied two subpopulations of K. arvensis, one at low and one at high density in Northampton, UK. To assess pollinator importance we exposed unvisited inflorescences to single visits by different groups of pollinators (butterflies, bumblebees, hoverflies and others) and assessed the proportion of pollinated stigmas. We then multiplied the effectiveness of each pollinator group with their proportional visitation frequency in five different years. For each group we also compared time spent on flowers and flight distance between visits. The relative importance of each pollinator group varied between years, as did their flight distances between flower visits. Butterflies were the best pollinators on a per visit basis (in terms of the proportion of stigmas pollinated) and flew further after visiting an inflorescence. Different measures and proxies of pollinator effectiveness varied between taxa, subpopulations, and years, and no one group of pollinators was consistently more effective than the others. Our results demonstrate the adaptive value of generalised pollination strategies when variation in relative abundance of different types of pollinators is considered. Such strategies may have buffered the ability of plants to reproduce during past periods of environmental change and may do so in the future.

*Named after the estimable local MP and radical Charles Bradlaugh – see my blog post When Charles collide: Darwin, Bradlaugh, and birth control for Darwin Day 2016

Using photographic mark-recapture to estimate population size, movement, and lifespan of a reintroduced butterfly – new study just published

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The reintroduction of the Chequered Skipper butterfly to England is one of the outstanding conservation success stories of the last ten years. I’ve been proud to play a part – see these old posts here, here and here – and in particular supervising Jamie Wildman’s PhD work. The second paper from his thesis has just been published and in it Jamie documents how you can identify individual butterflies by their markings and use this information to estimate the population size, life-span, and movements of Chequered Skippers. The technique could also be applied to other distinctively marked butterflies.

Here’s the reference with a link to a read-only version of the study:

Wildman, J.P., Ollerton, J., Bourn, N.A.D., O’Riordan, S. & McCollin, D., (2024) Using photographic mark-recapture to estimate population size, movement, and lifespan of a reintroduced butterfly. Biodiversity and Conservation (in press)

If you need a PDF, get in touch via my Contact page.

Here’s the abstract:

The chequered skipper butterfly Carterocephalus palaemon was reintroduced to Fineshade Wood, England in 2018 as part of a Butterfly Conservation-led project following several years of planning. From 2019–2022, the population was sampled each May–June by the lead author, timed count volunteers, Butterfly Conservation staff, and casual observers.

A novel photographic mark-recapture (PMR) technique was trialled as an alternative to mark-release-recapture (MRR). In conjunction with timed counts, PMR was used to photoidentify individual C. palaemon through each butterfly’s upperside (ups) wing markings, estimate daily and gross population size, detect movements, and determine lifespan. As capture and recapture can be achieved non-invasively using PMR, habitat disturbance, the potential to influence butterfly behaviour, accelerate wing wear, affect mate selection and predation, and heighten mortality risk through handling are eliminated. We found PMR to be a viable alternative to MRR for a sensitive reintroduction of a low-density species with unique ups markings such as C. palaemon. Using capture histories generated through PMR, from a known founder population size of 42 butterflies in 2018, we estimated the population at Fineshade Wood had increased to 618 butterflies (+ 1371.43%) by 2022.

Movements of up to 2.22 km over a time period of 17 days were also detected. Lastly, we discuss the implications of PMR for population sampling of other Lepidopterans, and the potential to improve cost-efficiency of the technique using machine-based learning tools.

From Cannock to Kunming is (only) 8,757 km

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It must be the best part of a decade since the last time I visited Cannock Chase Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. When I was still teaching at the University of Northampton we took students there every year to show them the diverse lowland heath landscapes, the ancient oak forest, the birch woods and the alder carr that runs through one of the small valleys.

Now that Karin and I have moved back to Britain, I can revisit some of these old haunts to see how much they have changed. Yesterday I returned to Cannock Chase with a group of friends, all former or current academics, a mix of geographers and ecologists. As we walked we discussed the local ecology and geomorphology, speculating or enlightening, as our knowledge allowed.

Highlights for me included a stunning, newly emerged male Orange Tip butterfly (Anthocharis cardamines) basking in the warm sunshine. I was also intrigued by these hour-glass shaped Hawthorn trees (Crataegus monogyna), presumably the product of grazing of older trees by deer that can cannot reach the highest stems (I said there was a bit of speculation going on!)

The swampy Sherbrook Valley always fascinates me, with its primeval atmosphere and dominating tussock grasses:

Look closer, however, and you see some real flowering gems such as Wood Sorrel (Oxalis acetosella) clinging to mossy stumps and broken branches:

All in all it was a great day: good company, wonderful landscape and wildlife, perfect weather, and lunch in a nearby pub.

You might be wondering about the title to this post. Well, next week I head to the Kunming Institute of Botany for three months of fieldwork and paper writing, and to deliver some talks. Then I’m briefly back in the UK before heading to the International Botanical Congress in Madrid for a week. During that time I’ll try to post about my adventures on the blog.