{"id":534444,"date":"2026-04-16T17:10:08","date_gmt":"2026-04-16T17:10:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/534444\/"},"modified":"2026-04-16T17:10:08","modified_gmt":"2026-04-16T17:10:08","slug":"rare-butterflies-spotted-after-430-trees-planted-in-the-quantocks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/534444\/","title":{"rendered":"Rare butterflies spotted after 430 trees planted in the Quantocks"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Rare butterflies have been spotted after a group of volunteers planted hundreds of elm trees.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">According to The UK Butterfly Monitoring Scheme, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/news\/articles\/c75kk7p41npo\" class=\"ssrcss-1e0jzsh-InlineLink e1kn3p7n0\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">butterflies are in sharp decline<\/a>, with the white-letter hairstreak species falling by 80% since the survey began in 1973.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">The Friends of the Quantocks has now planted more than 400 elm trees, the white-letter hairstreak&#8217;s natural habitat, in a bid to boost their numbers.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;A number of butterflies have been lost on the Quantocks over the past 75 years,&#8221; said Robin Stamp, chairman of the group. &#8220;We thought, let&#8217;s do our utmost to find it if it still does exist and then do something about its habitat, which are elm trees.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Rare butterflies have been spotted after a group of volunteers planted hundreds of elm trees. According to The&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":534445,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[90,56,54,55,4407],"class_list":["post-534444","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-science","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/534444","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=534444"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/534444\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/534445"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=534444"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=534444"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=534444"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}