The Guardian view on British butterflies: declining beauty | Editorial

Victims of intensive farming and the climate emergency, butterflies are beautiful - and vitalThe British are remarkably lucky, lepidopterally speaking: some of the most common butterflies to frequent the country are staggeringly beautiful. The peacock, with its four spectacular "eyes" set on wings of velvet burgundy, is a glorious sight as it suns itself, wings held open. The modest common blue, sometimes seen in urban gardens, has a delicate upperwing the colour of an early summer sky, and an underwing speckled with dots and smudges, like characters in a yet-to-be-decoded language. Or there's the painted lady - a large, handsome chequerboard of amber, chestnut and flecks of white. A migrant to British shores, it flies from southern Europe and north Africa each spring. These remarkable travellers are beginning to cross the English Channel now, the last leg of an epic, seemingly impossible journey. In the autumn, their progeny will fly back south.But all is not well for British butterflies. Britain has - depending on how you count them - 58 species (compared with 2,500 or so of moths). Research conducted by the charity Butterfly Conservation has found that 24 of these are now threatened. The downward trend in numbers is long-term: a serious decline began to take hold after the second world war when intensive farming methods were adopted. Unpredictable, extreme weather patterns and the use of nitrate fertiliser (which encourages grass on farmland to grow thick and lush when butterflies often prefer it sparse and short) are also having an insidious effect. Continue reading...