A BUTTERFLY thought to have become extinct in the Cotswolds 40 years ago has returned to the area.

Adonis blues are notoriously reluctant to travel more than a few hundred yards from their colony, yet the species travelled up to 25 miles to reach Stroud, Gloucestershire.

The grassland sites that the butterfly moved into were being grazed by the National Trust to encourage a range of rare insects and flowers, but the Adonis blue was completely unexpected.

“We were preparing the land for other creatures,” Matthew Oates, of the National Trust, said. “The last thing we expected was for the Adonis blue to arrive. It was completely beyond our wildest expectations.”

The return to the Cotswolds marks the most northerly colonies of Adonis blues since the 1960s, when the species started to crash. There were as few as 70 colonies left by 1980.

In the past ten years the butterfly has enjoyed a resurgence, both in overall population and the number of colonies, but it is still a threatened species. Butterfly Conservation, a charity specialising in protecting the insects, said that the Adonis blue remained one of the nine most threatened species in Britain.

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