Feeding Caterpillars to Help Butterflies Thrive

Cinnabar moth caterpillars on ragwort
(Author’s own photo)

Wildlife conservation and climate action are often considered as separate environmental issues, but thetwo are utterly intertwined. We know that combatting climate change helps save wildlife populations around the globe, but the reverse is also true: Wildlife conservation plays an essential role in regulating our climate. By saving wildlife, we help save the lives of many creatures living on our planet, including ourselves.

As I'm lucky enough to have a garden, this is where I can help wildlife. I can also donate to charities who are helping wildlife as I feel able and I would encourage you to consider doing so. Becoming a member of your local Wildlife Trust might be a good start if you can afford the small monthly donation. I have listed details of the Wildlife Trusts and several more wildlife and environmental charities on this page.

Insects and other invertebrates are at the bottom of the food change, so if we harm them we will cause harm higher up the food chain. If our garden is too tidy for bugs to find a home hedgehogs will be unable to find food or shelter in our garden and this ancient, native British wild animal is struggling for its survival. Insects and other invertebrates are the hedgehog’s main natural food source. A typical diet includes: beetles, earwigs, caterpillars, earthworms, millipedes and fly larvae. 

Much of my garden was neglected as my parents became too old and ill to look after it. Unfortunately I haven't been entirely well recently, so I've struggled to take it all back under control so far, which means lots of rooms for insects, beetles and other bugs. I haven't seen a hedgehog yet, but I did see signs of hedgehog activity on my lawn earlier in the year, so I don't plan to make my garden all neat and tidy. I'm planning to leave some nettles and brambles at the edges and other areas some people might think untidy. 

There's white clover growing in my lawn , a little bit of buttercup in a damper area and some black medic arrived recently. I've transplanted a small clump of little daisies from my last garden, and they still look healthy. 

I believe there's room for me and nature in this garden. 

As I've let my lawn grow long from May to July for the last two years, I've been rewarded by Meadow brown and  Gatekeeper butterflies flying up as I walk through it on the mown path, as well as a few small Skippers and small creamy beige moths. Some caterpillars live on and in grass; it's their food and their home. It also helps that I don't use weedkillers, moss killer or any insecticides on my lawn anywhere in my garden, these can all be harmful to insects and very probably to anything which eats insects which have come into contact with garden chemicals. 

Something I noticed when we stopped using chemicals in my last garden was the return of the songbirds which have a healthier diet in a chemical free garden. Butterflies and native bees will also be more abundant in wilder, chemical free garden and I have some of them too. As well as flowers to provide nectar and pollen our pollinators need undisturbed areas to breed. Some bumblebees use discarded mouse holes or birds nests. 

Many caterpillars live on or near their favourite food plants to complete their lifecycle and emerge as beautiful moths or butterflies. Many caterpillars as specialists eating only one or two types of plant. This is why it's helpful to have as wide a range of native plants as possible in our gardens, from native trees, including fruit trees, bushes and hedging plants to native flowers and even plants like nettles. Several species of caterpillar feed on nettles, so getting rid of them all means fewer Comma, Peacock, Red Admiral and Small Tortoiseshell butterflies. Perhaps leaving a decent sized clump of nettles is the reason I've seen all those butterflies in my garden, although not many of them. There are a lot fewer butterflies than there used to be, which is why we need to provide as many plants to feed caterpillars as we can. Apparently cutting your nettles back to encourage tender new growth just before the breeding seasons is likely to attract more of those butterflies to lay their eggs on your nettles. 

I've been extremely pleased to find a clump of ragwort, in the neglected part of my garden, covered in the yellow and black striped caterpillars of the cinnabar moth. I've been leaving some ragwort plants to grow in my garden for years without noticing any of these jolly striped creatures.  I have removed some ragwort as it has a lot of seed, which can grow almost anywhere. If you cut the flowers just before they start to seed that can reduce the number of plants popping up, or you can weed them out of everywhere except your designated wildlife corners. This is best done when they are still small. Ragwort is not normally a problem for horses or any wild animals. It is poisonous and that poison protects the Cinnabar moth caterpillars because it makes them taste unpleasant, just like the plant itself. The unpleasant taste means very few animals will eat ragwort. The Cinnabar moth is a rare exception.

If you want to know more about gardening for pollinators there's lots of helpful information on the Butterfly Conservation Trust website:

Gardening for butterflies

Gardening for moths

and on the Bumblebee Conservation Trust website:

Gardening for Bumblebees

If you don't have garden you could plant herbs or flowers in a window box or planter.

Inheritance

The garden I've inherited
(author's own photo)

When I was 4 years old my dad sat me down and showed me the atlas. He pointed to Canada and told me we were going on a big boat to live there and that is what we did. In the holidays Mum and Dad took us camping by the lakes in the big Canadian forests. I remember sometimes we went to the Algonquin National Park. Dad liked exploring “virgin forest” and looking for moose. Luckily he never got close to one. He had romantic notions about unspoilt “Urwalt” picked up from reading Karl May books as a teenager.

I remember being scared once when Dad took us all looking for bears. I was glad that we didn't see any on that occasion. When we did it was a mother Black Bear and her two cubs foraging at the back of the campsite garbage dump with us safely on the other side, not far from our car. On another evening when we were eating dinner outside our tent we heard wolves howling in the distance, which was also a bit scary for a little girl who had been brought up in the suburbs of a country where dangerous animals had almost all been exterminated in earlier centuries.

I did find it interesting to see a beaver dam though. It was only a passing glimpse as we drove past but I can still recall that image. Closer to home I liked to see the small jewel coloured hummingbirds which visited the Nicotiana flowers, which my parents had planted in the front garden.

After a few years we returned to England because Mum missed her family and friends. She never learned to drive and the bus service in Burlington wasn’t good. My mum and I were both born in Hampshire as my grandmother, her mother and at least three more generations of my great grandmother’s family had been.

Back home my dad had to make do with walks in the New Forest, a large part of which was plantations between open areas of heathland. The pockets of native trees, some of which were probably the remains of ancient forest, had a much wider variety of plants and birds for me to spot. I went to one of those areas on a fungus foray organised by my school. Thankfully much of the New Forest still remains in tact today.

On country walks in the New Forest or in the countryside around where we lived my mum would tell me the names of the wildflowers and the birds which we saw, just like her mother had done when she was a girl. She had walked for miles with her mother from a young age and then cycled longer distances with her family when she was old enough. My father passed on a love of trees and forests in particular and my mother, her love of birds, butterflies and wildflowers, but they both loved nature and I have inherited that love and respect of the natural world.

I remember flocks of lapwings on fields near my house in the Autumn. Close by is an area named Peewit Hill, so lapwings (aka peewits) had been common there for a good while. I think they continued to visit after the big Tesco store was built, but then the fields stopped being ploughed and were used for car boot sales. The lapwings stopped coming. Now there are houses where the fields once were.

All around me many of the fields and woods of my childhood have been built on. I appreciate that people need to live somewhere and the demand for houses in the South East is very high. It would help everyone in the UK if jobs were spread more evenly over the whole country. As it isn't some areas suffer from high unemployment and empty buildings while others have to suffer the destruction of the countryside and an increase in noise and pollution with regular traffic jams at busy times. 

Since the Industrial Revolutions Britain has lost 50% of its biodiversity (wild plants and animals), leaving some key species on the edge of extinction. We have lost much of this in the last 50 years, so in my own lifetime. I mourn the lack of birdsong and the loss of so many wildflowers, and the fact that we're driving hedgehogs, common toads and turtledoves to extinction, but it's not just about sentiment; without a healthy environment, inhabited by healthy populations of a wide range of wildlife, we will be less resilient to climate change and food could become scarcer.

You can read more about what scientists at London's Natural History Museum have discovered about the state of nature in Britain here.

I have been lucky to inherit my parents' garden. I worry what sort of world my children will inherit, so I shall do what I can to improve the environment in my garden to provide what habitats and food for wildlife I can in that space. It already has bushes where birds make their nests and I'm busy adding more flowers to try to provide nectar and pollen for as many months as possible. I've planted some flat open flowers like daisies and single dahlias, as well as penstemons and foxgloves for insects which prefer tubular flowers. Variety is the key to feeding a wide range of pollinators. If everyone in Britain did what they could to help wildlife, nature in Britain would be in a better state.

I'd love to hear what you're doing to help nature.

Helping Insects Helps Us All

Painted Lady Butterfly on Hidcote Pink Penstemon
in author's garden, August 2021

Humans Need Nature

Many plants and animals are struggling because of climate change.  Some are in danger of going extinct, yet we all depend on them to help us stop climate change getting worse.

Plants have a central role in regulating our climate, which is why we need large numbers of many different plants to mitigate global warming and keep our environment healthy.  All plants absorb CO2, not just trees. 

The destruction of the Earth’s vegetation, by felling forests,  draining wet lands, building on scrub and grassland etc is making global warming worse. If we don't stop the destruction we will suffer even greater climate change than we are already. All kinds of animals have helped to create these landscapes and keep them healthy. Insects alone play a crucial role.

We Need Insects

‘If we and the rest of the back-boned animals were to disappear overnight, the rest of the world would get on pretty well. But if the invertebrates were to disappear, the world’s ecosystems would collapse.’ -  Sir David Attenborough

Almost 90% of the world's wild plants depend on animal pollination as do 75% of the most important crops globally. 

Over 100,000 invertebrates, including ants, bees, butterflies, beetles, flies, moths and wasps, along with more than a thousand mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians take on the job of pollinating plants. This biodiverse group of wildlife buzzes, flutters, and creeps from plant to plant, dining on protein-rich pollen and high-energy nectar. As they move, they transport and deposit pollen, fertilizing plants and allowing those plants to reproduce.

If we destroy insects and other invertebrates by destroying their habitats and poisoning them with pesticides, weedkillers and any other toxic chemicals they won't be able to keep the flowers that depend on them alive. It will also make it difficult to grow many crops. 

Birds, bats and many other animals depend on invertebrates for food. This is another reason why there needs to be an abundant supply. All life depends on all other life. If too many creatures go extinct we will all start to feel the affects.  

This is why we need sweeping reforms of how all land is managed, from large farms and estates to local parks and roadside verges. Until that happens all ordinary individuals can change is what happens in our gardens or any other outdoor space we manage, even if it's only a window box.

Giving Back to Wildlife

You might have heard of No Mow May. The idea behind this initiative from Plantlife is to encourage as many people as possible to leave a suitable area of grass to grow long, preferably all Summer, to allow wildflowers to grow and set seed, but also to enable insects and other animals which live in long grass, and wildflower meadows to thrive. When we are able to do this in part of our gardens, we are helping to replace the meadows and grasslands, which have been destroyed to make way for human "progress" over the last centuries. Our own houses might well have been built on them. 

My parents always bought new houses, so all the homes I inhabited as a child were probably built on natural or semi-natural spaces. The house I have returned to live in was built on erstwhile strawberry fields, but before that it might have been meadow or more likely woodland as there was a small copse nearby when I was growing up, now mostly built on. Many of the fields of my childhood have been built on too, some very recently. A growing population does need somewhere to live, but it would be good if all of us could give something back to help nature, which is why I've been letting my lawn grow long and doing other things to help pollinators.

In my last garden I finally persuaded my husband to stop using weedkillers and pesticides after living in the house for ten years. We noticed the difference within a year or two. There were a lot more birds, bees ad butterflies in the garden and grasshoppers became noticeable in the grass. More recently we started letting part of the lawn grow long there and stopped pulling out all the weeds. During lockdown I noticed shield bugs on the garlic mustard. Some were hawthorn shield bugs, presumably attracted by the hawthorn in our established hedge, planted by previous owners. I also started noticing the different types of hoverflies and native bees.

Pollinators are very important insects, so here a some suggestions for how we can help them:

How to Help Pollinators

1. Leave some grass to grow long over the Summer, if possible.
2. Don't use pesticides or herbicides, both of which can kill insects & other invertebrates and are very probably harmful to humans, pets and other animals too.
3. Grow different types of flowers, some flat shapes like Daisies and Verbena bonariensus, bell shapes, tube shapes like Penstemons, Foxgloves and Fuchsia, spikes like Lavender, Nepeta and Salvias etc. Different insects are different sizes and have different types of tongues.
4. If you don't have a garden you could grow smaller varieties in a window box or pot.
5. Deadhead flowers, mulch with organic compost, and water well to keep the plants healthy and flowering for longer.
6. Try to provide flowers from early Spring through to late Autumn.
7. Leave corners of your garden to provide habitats.
8. Buy peat Free Compost. Peat bogs are home to many special animals and plants, including the Large Heath butterfly, which is declining across Europe. There are now good alternatives to peat available from garden centres.
9. Join in the Great Big Butterfly Count, an event organised by the Butterfly Conservation Trust which is happening now until the 6th August this year. It happens around the same time every year to monitor the state of the UK's declining butterfly population.

Are you doing some of these things already? Perhaps you'd like to pass on some tips. What else can we do to help pollinators and other insects? Let us know in the comments.