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.

Eating to Save the Planet

A tasty veggie burrito with salad
in the Sustainability Centre Cafe

Consumers Choices Decide the Future

However bad global warming gets it's unlikely to destroy Planet Earth. When we talk about saving the planet we really mean saving human beings and the other lifeforms we share our planet with. The choices we make today, this year and for the rest of this decade are likely to decided whether our children inherit a warmer planet which is a bit more difficult to live on but has most of the animals they grew up with and on which most areas are still habitable, or whether they inherit a planet on which most lifeforms will soon die out. 

It's therefore vital that we choose wisely and carefully in order to give our children and grandchildren the best possible chance of a decent future without any more unnecessary suffering than is normal in the world as we know it

What we eat has an affect on our own health, but it also has an affect on the health of the climate and our environment, and so on the health of every living thing.  This means that the choices we make are crucial in shaping the future of life on our planet.

Eat Organic

If we choose some organic produce, not only are we consuming less potentially harmful chemicals, but the  fewer toxic chemicals there will be in the environment from spraying them onto conventionally grown crops and into the surrounding environment, and from rain washing those toxic chemicals into rivers and other water courses. This will help insects and all manner of other wildlife to have a better chance of survival, and we saw I my last blog how important wildlife, and particularly insects, are for a liveable climate and a thriving environment.

Moreover artificial fertilisers, weedkillers, fungicides and pesticides are all made from fossil fuels, so the more of them being used, the worse global warming with become.

You can buy organic fruit and veg in supermarkets or from veg box schemes, or you could grow your own.

Less Meat

If we eat less meat, fewer forests will need to be chopped down to grow grass for grazing. 

We need more farms like Racy Ghyll Farm, run by James Rebanks and his family the Lake District and other people like them, who sometimes call themselves regenerative farmers. They are not intensive farmers. Rebanks moves his stock around regularly so that no area of pasture is overgrazed allowing nature to thrive on his farm. He has also restored hedgerows which had been ripped out when larger fields with room for large farm machinery were the fashion. This more nature friendly form of farming produces less meat than if all the fields were being grazed to the maximum and supplementary feeding was implemented to make up for any shortfall in nutrition, but it's so much better for wildlife and the environment and produces far fewer greenhouse gases than if it were dependent on machinery, artificial fertilisers, pesticides and herbicides. Healthy grassland absorbs more CO2 than overgrazed pasture. A more natural diet with a wider range of fodder plants could even result in better digestion for the livestock and less methane production. 

Moreover, large, intensive farms produce vast quantities of slurry, which can easily wash into rivers adding to the problems caused by the excessive amount of untreated sewage currently pouring into them. This increases the risk of diseases spreading to humans, other mammals, birds, insects and all other wildlife. I understand that it's thought possible that industrial scale poultry farms have helped to spread bird flu. Slurry finding its way into rivers can result in people who swim in them picking up diseases such as E.coli. 

More Food from Plants

If we want to be healthier we are encouraged to eat more vegetables and fruit and other food from plants such as beans, peas and lentils, nuts and grains. Eating less meat also helps to reduce climate change and keep our environment healthier, so basing a lot of our meals on vegetables, pulses, grains and nuts benefits everyone except those with intensive livestock farms. Cashews are great in stir fries and some curries. There are also lots of delicious curries, stews and soups using pulses instead of meat and fish.

Eating less meat doesn't mean eating no meat. You can have beans with a little bit of beef in chilli con carne or you can enjoy a meat free, three bean chilli, which is just as tasty in my opinion, and have the occasional meat based meal. The same applies to everything else. You don't have to become a vegan to make a difference. If everyone in the world ate half the amount of meat they do at the moment, then half the land used to raise livestock currently could be returned to nature and no more virgin forest or ancient woodlands or meadows would need to be destroyed for pasture or to build industrial scale farm units on.

Eat Pulses to Save Money

Eating pulses like peas, chickpeas, beans and lentils is usually cheaper than eating meat. To save money my mum would regularly make lentil soup, especially in the cooler months. Dhals and chilli made with beans but not meat are also cheap and easy to make if you prefer your food on the spicy side. By eating cheaper pulses some of the time you will be able to choose higher welfare meat raised in more environmentally friendly ways when you do eat meat.

So it's worth experimenting with some meat free meals for your health and the health of the planet, and maybe even for the health of your bank balance. What's your favourite meat free meal? Let us know in the comments