I was on a social media platform a few weeks ago when there was a sudden flurry of excited reports about a large copper butterfly being seen. Why was that exciting? Because the Large Copper went extinct in Britain 150 years ago.
Now I’ve photographed every British breeding butterfly, but I don’t have a photo of the large copper. It’s a truly beautiful butterfly, with burnished orange upperwings and spotted underwings. It’s a close relative of one of my favourite British butterflies, the small copper.
Yet despite this, I didn’t rush to see the butterfly. Why? Because this butterfly was a release from a breeder.
Very rarely, extinct butterflies have returned by themselves – the large toroiseshell managed it a few years ago – and others, like the Large Blue and the English chequered skipper have been brought back in carefully-managed reintroductions. But every year, some exotic butterfly or a former native shows up in online photos, which was neither a licensed reintroduction nor a genuine return. Like the large coppers, these are illegal releases by butterfly enthusiasts, who buy butterfly eggs online, breed the butterflies up to adults, and then release them.
Why do they do this? Certainly, part of it is the love of the butterfly itself. Butterflies are living artworks, gloriously beautiful and evocative of hot, pleasant summer days. But I have more than a suspicion that most of the reason that people do it is the chance to claim a bit of glory, of being the first to ‘discover’ a new species, or take the credit for getting that rare and special photo. Yet the reality is that people who really care for our wildlife would never do it. Releasing non-native butterflies is actually a criminal offense (i.e. the kind you can, at least in theory, go to jail for). The Wildlife and Countryside Act make it an offence to:
release or allow to escape into the wild any animal which is not ordinarily resident in Great Britain and is not a regular visitor to Great Britain in a wild state
But why do I call this behaviour stupid?
One argument is that by bringing unscreened eggs into the UK, you risk introducing new diseases that could impact our existing, deepely threatened butterflies. I saw a comment online – in a butterfly enthusiast’s group – from someone who said that this was just scaremongering, because butterflies can make their own way to the UK if winds are right. Comments like that make me despair. Let’s think about it from a human perspective for a moment: Dengue fever is a potentially deadly disease spread by mosquitoes. Tens of thousands of people die from it every year in Africa. It has now made the jump to Southern France. If I started importing mosquitoes into the UK, with a real chance of bringing with them a disease that could kill you, your friends and your family, would you say that was Ok because “they could just fly here anyway”? Or might you think that just because a disaster can happen naturally isn’t a good reason to help it along?
Then there is the argument about egg collections themselves. Unless you did the egg collection youself, in person, then you have no way of knowing if the eggs were taken from the wild or not. Wildlife crime is big business, and just because butterfly eggs are small doesn’t mean that their illegal harvesting and sale isn’t lucrative. The large copper is declining in parts of its range, and there’s a chance that your selfishness could be helping it along.
And the fact is that populations of species behave differently. The now-extinct British race of the large copper only has one brood a year. Most foreign populations have two. While that may not seem important, this different behaviour risks having the introduced species compete directly or indirectly with other native ones. Yes, it’s unlikely, but the fact is, we don’t know. That’s why licensed introduction are performed so slowy and carefully
Undoubtedly, some DIY introductions have succeeded. This photograph is of a glanville fritillary.
It’s one of a stable population in London that started off many years ago as an introduction. But releasing butterflies is a bit like juggling axes: just because it worked once isn’t a reason to keep doing it. So to the butterfly enthusiast who released the large copper butterflies, and to all those who think it’s an OK thing to do: think again, please. You could well be making a bad situation a whole lot worse, and that’s not something that anyone who genuinely loves our butterflies would ever do.
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