The Lady vanishes!

12 comments

This was from Butterfly Conservation today and shows our counting the butterflies does help their research:

The mystery of the autumn disappearance of the Painted Lady has finally been solved.

Researchers working as part of a pan-European team showed that Painted Ladies leave Britain in the autumn and fly south. This ends decades of speculation that Britain was a dead end for the butterflies which cannot survive our winters.

The reason why these emigrants are rarely seen is that the Painted Ladies ascend hundreds of metres into the sky, out of sight of observers on the ground, in order to take advantage of favourable tailwinds. This discovery was made using radar that can detect tiny objects up to 1km altitude.
Members of the public played a vital part in the study too. Over 60,000 sightings of Painted Ladies across Europe during the boom year of 2009 were used to piece together the journeys undertaken by this amazing butterfly.

Some 10,000 people in Britain contributed by taking part in our online Painted Lady survey and the UK Butterfly Monitoring Scheme. All this effort revealed an epic 9,000 mile round trip, from sub-Saharan Africa to the Arctic Circle, undertaken by a succession of up to six generations of Painted Ladies each year.

• 31 Oct, 2012
• 17 likes

More blog posts by drc726