The high brown fritillary is gone from most places. Once everywhere in Wales and England, this butterfly now stares at extinction. Numbers dropped 62 percent since 1970.
It’s not lazy. It’s just picky.
“They are the pickiest,” says Paul Dunn.
He’s spent thirty years crawling through bracken in Old Castle Down, Vale of Glamorgan. Trying to keep these things alive. And guess who finally helped? Cows.
Not robots. Not genetic engineers. Regular dairy cows.
Here is the problem: The fritillary needs bracken. But it also needs common dog violet. That violet is the only food the caterpillars will eat. The catch? Too much bracken chokes the violet out.
Traditionally, humans cleared bracken by pulling it for animal bedding. No one does that anymore. We buy straw now. Convenient. Bad for butterflies.
Richard Smith, Paul’s partner since 1993, knows the stakes.
“The plant hasn’t been able to adapt its life cycle,” he said. “The cutting of the bracken is essential.”
So the volunteers did something radical. For the first time in fifty years, they invited local farmers to put cows on the land.
This worked. Why?
Cattle are heavy. They trample bracken down without destroying it. They churn up the earth. This uneven ground traps heat. Warmer micro-niches mean better conditions for the larvae. It’s biology, handled by hoofbeats.
No fences were involved. Common land usually has no barriers. To stop the cattle wandering off, the team used National Lottery funds to buy solar-panel collars. Electric shock boundaries. Invisible but effective.
It’s the butterflies that brought them together
Paul says it became a community. Not just people, animals, plants. All tangled up.
Over the last decade, over thirty-seven butterfly species appeared in this small patch of Wales. The high brown is rising. Finally.
Was thirty-three years of weekly volunteering worth it?
Paul doesn’t hesitate.
“Fantastic,” he says. “Yes. It’s become a beautiful obsession.”
