{"id":684068,"date":"2026-07-10T10:53:07","date_gmt":"2026-07-10T10:53:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/684068\/"},"modified":"2026-07-10T10:53:07","modified_gmt":"2026-07-10T10:53:07","slug":"butterflies-bridgend-habitat-protected-by-volunteers-and-cows","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/684068\/","title":{"rendered":"Butterflies&#8217; Bridgend habitat protected by volunteers &#8211; and cows"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">With its brilliant orange wings and black markings, the high brown fritillary butterfly was once widespread in Wales and England.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">But now it&#8217;s one of the rarest of all British butterflies, with it numbers declining by 62% since 1970.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">One reason is its incredibly specific requirements to survive.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;They are the pickiest,&#8221; says Paul Dunn, who for more than 30 years has been working hard among the bracken of the Alun Valley at Old Castle Down, in the Vale of Glamorgan, to revive the butterfly&#8217;s fortunes.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">And now, the volunteers have enlisted the help of a far more common animal, by allowing cows to graze on the site.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"With its brilliant orange wings and black markings, the high brown fritillary butterfly was once widespread in Wales&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":684069,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[90,56,54,55,4407],"class_list":["post-684068","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\/684068","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=684068"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/684068\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/684069"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=684068"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=684068"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=684068"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}