Just two years after its last wheat harvest, Halnaker Hill farm in West Sussex is alive with butterflies, The Guardian reports. Ecologist Neil Hulme counted 5,290 of them on the 133-hectare site.
Since 2024 the fields on the South Downs have been sown with wildflowers and herbal leys, and the farm has gained 7km of new hedgerows, seven hectares of woodland and three ponds, with cattle mob-grazing the old chalk grassland. Among the butterflies were 85 small blues and seven dingy skippers, two scarce species never seen on the fields before, alongside hundreds of small heaths. Skylarks, corn buntings and hobbies have turned up too.
The farm pays its way by selling biodiversity net gain credits to developers, and it is part of a wider programme restoring more than 7,700 hectares of the South Downs. Hulme now plans to reintroduce another rare butterfly next year.
Source: The Guardian