Exciting times ahead! Thanks to players of the National Lottery, Butterfly Conservation has secured funding from the National Lottery Heritage Fund (NLHF) to deliver an ambitious new project, ‘Big City Butterflies’ that will support Londoners to discover butterflies and moths, and in doing so will connect them with nature and their local green spaces.
The people reached through the project will have opportunities to learn about butterflies and moths, how to seek them out, to enjoy them and to help them thrive in their neighbourhoods.
The Big City Butterflies project will enable Butterfly Conservation to make some important discoveries too. We need to understand more about how populations are faring in the capital. In London, butterflies and moths are under-recorded, and we’ll be providing training opportunities to equip a new wave of urban recorders in the heart of the city.
Through our development work for the project in 2019, we identified a network of sites across inner London on which to focus our activities, and will continue to make connections with local community and volunteer groups. We’ll be working with land managers to enhance and connect London’s green spaces, so that they can better support butterflies and moths.
The project will draw on the local knowledge and expertise of our four London-based Butterfly Conservation Branches, Surrey & SW London, Kent & SE London, Herts & Middlesex and Cambridge & Essex.
We can’t wait to get started, and will soon be beginning the recruitment process as we search for two Project Officers to lead and deliver the project. Huge thanks to all of our fantastic supporters, members and volunteers for enabling us to reach this point!