Incredible – I’d never seen it before – two white butterflies linked together in courtship flying at speed about 1m over our heads. The shout from one of our trainees standing next to me was loud:
“Black-veined whites!!!”
Oh gosh, lots of thoughts tumbled through my mind. We were witnessing the first free flying BVWs in the Devon countryside for over 160 years. They were mating. They were mating while in flight – who knew they did that!
That would mean the female would lay eggs very soon – would we see that too?! Our trainees are here with us to witness these incredible events. This is nature recovery in action, right in front of us, in this moment – this gives us hope for the future. Emotions run high.
“Over there”, the next shout – we all follow the pointing arm towards the mating pair landing on a hawthorn.
A realisation that we’ve actually pulled this off, we’ve returned a missing species, or at least we’ve started that journey for these butterflies. It’ll take a few years, but we’re on our way together. It felt the right thing to do when we first discussed it. A moral obligation to put a piece of the complex jigsaw of nature back in place – because we are all nature, and we’ve destroyed so much of it and we can now start to reverse that – and now, today, it’s happened, right in front of us! How humbling is that. I think of all the people involved, all the encouragement we’ve had as this story has unfolded and challenges us almost to exasperation. What an incredible team effort. And it’s worked!
✍️Simon Roper
