Butterfly Recovery projects in macclesfield

The Brimstone is a vibrant yellow butterfly, sightings of which are often the first signs of spring in the UK.  The Brimstone butterfly has an exclusive relationship with just one plant - the Alder Buckthorn - on which it must lay its eggs to provide food for its growing caterpillars.

The Brimstone Buddy project is about increasing the amount of available food and nectar plants for these beautiful butterflies.  Macc Wild are planting Alder Buckthorn on sites across Macclesfield to help increase Brimstone numbers.

We are incorporating Alder Buckthorn into all of our planting schemes and also delivering the Brimstone Buddy project in a number of primary schools in Macclesfield. The children learn about the Brimstone lifecycle during a special assembly and then plant Alder Buckthorn in the school grounds. On a return visit in early summer, we will help the children look for Brimstone caterpillars on their trees and discover the exciting world of moths through a moth trap brought in to school.

This is a Citizen Science project too and we will be encouraging participants to record any eggs and caterpillars found and sightings of adult Brimstones on a project page on iNaturalist.

https://www.inaturalist.org/ A link to the project page will be available soon. 

If you would like an Alder Buckthorn to plant in your garden please get in touch. We have trees available for planting each year between February and the end of March but can reserve one for you any time.

This project is funded by the William Dean Countryside and Educational Trust and by Scoop and Scales in Macclesfield

After the initial excitement back in April we have successfully encouraged many eggs to be laid on most of our Alder Buckthorn trees at the various sites in and around Macclesfield.

Hopefully many of these will make it all the way to becoming butterflies, continue the cycle and help grow Macclesfield's population of Brimstone Butterflies.  Please see the gallery section for more of Diana's stunning photographs of "our" caterpillars.

Next year we plan to work with 4 new schools in Macclesfield - if you have any candidates for inclusion in our programme, please drop us a line with your contact details!

The elusive White-Letter Hairstreak is another butterfly with a critical relationship with a particular foodplant, breeding on a number of species of Elm Tree. Unfortunately since the 1970s when Dutch Elm Disease (DED) became prevalent, many Elm trees have been lost. 

In the Macclesfield area, Wych Elm Ulmus glabra once grew widely along the 11 mile long Middlewood Way. Some areas of Wych Elm remain, for example at Jackson’s Brickworks and within Poynton Coppice. However, numbers of the White-letter Hairstreak butterfly (WLH) has declined by more than 90%.

Elm trees have been planted over the 2022/23 and 2023/24 seasons and this planting will continue in future years to ensure a continuous supply of young elm and to create a corridor between existing Elms and White-letter Hairstreak colonies at Jackson’s Brickworks, Poynton Coppice and along the Middlewood Way itself, developing landscape-scale habitat suitable for the species. 

This ambitious  project will also allow the butterfly to recolonise other areas along the Middlewood Way with the aim of eventually bringing White-letter Hairstreak back to Macclesfield. This is a Partnership Project between Macc Wild Network, Cheshire and Wirral Butterfly Conservation and Cheshire East Ranger Service. Macclesfield Community Tree Nursery have supplied Wych Elm saplings grown from locally sourced seed and Butterfly Conservation have funded the purchase of disease resistant Sapporo Gold Elms.

If you would like to find out more about the project please drop us a line and we will get back to you.  It is a long term project so plenty to do in the future!