The Cliffe Butterfly Transect
Posts, photos and stats for the butterfly transect on the Cliffe in North Shropshire.
The Cliffe is a lowland heath on a sandstone ridge running North to South between the village of Ruyton XI Towns and the Nesscliffe Country Park
#ukbutterflies
- Completed the first survey week on our local butterfly transect today. We saw 16 individuals in four species. To put this into context we had only ever reported a single butterfly for week 1 across all previous four years. What a great start to the year
- Just under a week to go till the start of our butterfly transect for 2025 It’s encouraging that there have been so many sightings of our early butterflies. Could this year be a good one?
- Here are four more charts each showing an individual species and the number recorded per section for each of the years of our survey on the transect. All are members of the Nymphalidae family and all show that they did not suffer on our site in 2024. #ukbutterflies #butterflytransect
- One of the butterfly species that bucked the trend on our transect in 2024 was the Orange Tip. This data and chart show an upward trend. Would anyone care to speculate why this species did well? Did this happen for you as well? #ukbutterflies #butterflytransect
- My spreadsheet of all the transect data can give me this data as well, section by section comparisons. This is helpful in targeting conservation work for individual species
- I record our survey results in a spreadsheet so that I can see statistics throughout the year. Here is an extract from one of the summary tables.
- One evening towards the end of July this year this Essex Skipper was found on the Cliffe. If the team can find them next year during the UKBMS transect survey then it will be the first time it will have been recorded during the four years of records. #ukbms #transect #butterflies
- A little history about our transect. I was involved with conservation on the site and the Park Ranger asked if I and others would be interested in a butterfly transect. I found others who wanted to be involved and there are now 8 of us, three couples and two individuals. We started in 2021
- A good fall of snow over the last two days in North Shropshire but a beautiful afternoon so this was an opportunity to take some photos and show you what our site looks like
