School of Sustainability

A hundred years gone, the black-veined white returns in a cage

In August, in a corner of the Knepp estate in West Sussex, there are netted cages with eggs inside them. The eggs belong to the black-veined white, a butterfly that has been extinct in Britain for roughly a century, laid by adults brought over from Spain earlier this year. Standing at the netting is Neil Hulme, a butterfly conservationist, watching the way you watch something you cannot actually protect.

The plan is simple to say and hard to do. The caterpillars that hatch from these eggs have to survive an English winter, outdoors, in cages that keep the worst off but not everything - predators work their way through netting, and cold does what it likes. Come spring, whatever has made it through will be counted, and the butterflies that emerge will be released on the South Downs. The whole enterprise hangs on a number nobody will know until next year: how many come out the other side of winter.

The episode is part of the Knepp Wilding podcast, hosted by Isabella Tree, co-founder of the rewilding project and author of Wilding. Knepp has made a habit of this kind of long-odds patience - letting land and species find their way back over years rather than managing them towards a target. A reintroduction like this one is the sharpest version of the same wager: you do the work, you wait through the winter, and you find out afterwards whether it was enough.

Knepp Estate · Read the source