The Manx Wildlife Trust is the island’s leading nature conservation charity with more than 300 acres of land as reserves, and we are promoters and champions of the wonderful wildlife and habitats in, on and around our beautiful island and keep a close eye on what is happening to it.

Have you noticed how all our wildlife is really waking up now?

Spring time flowers are out in force and pollinating insects are correspondingly increasing in numbers.

Our challenge for this month is to look for and report back to us is the orange tip butterfly.

Butterflies are an excellent indicator for us about changes to our climate and they can tell us lots about how healthy our ecosystems are.

Today, three quarters of British butterflies are in decline. Due to their reliance on food plants for the larvae and often different food plants for the adult (imago) stage, they react quickly to changes in the environment

The orange tipped butterfly is a fairly common butterfly, and medium sized.

The males are unmistakable; white butterflies with bright orange wing tips whilst the females are white with black wing tips. Both have mottled green underwings

Orange-tips prefer damp habitats such as meadows, woodland glades, hedgerows and the banks of streams and rivers, but readily visit gardens as well.

Females lay single, pale, spindle-shaped eggs on the underside of flower buds and these eggs will turn deep orange after a few days.

The caterpillars are green and extremely hard to spot, and hatch and feed on ladies’ smock, honesty bittercress and turnips.

Orange-tip caterpillars can be cannibalistic, and are liable to eat another of their own species should they meet.

Each caterpillar leaves its foodplant to overwinter as a chrysalis, probably in bushes and tall vegetation, emerging in April as adults.

We are particularly interested to find out the dates of the first sightings of orange tips.

If you love watching butterflies, look out for our identification courses, one as part of Manx Wildlife week on Thursday, May 9 at the Manx Museum in Douglas, (see their website for details) and a more in depth course on Saturday, August 3. See the Manx Wildlife Trust website and Facebook page for more details.

We are appealing to people to become our eyes and ears and report back to us what wildlife you see.

In these articles we are looking at particular species we want to find out more about.

We call this citizen science, and anyone can do it.

All we ask is you report back to us your sightings via the email [email protected], include details of what you have seen, where you have seen it, the date, how to contact you in case of queries and, if possible, try to include photographs.

Watch out for our postcard guide for four species found on island, kindly designed and sponsored by Royale Maps.

Happy spotting!

by Dawn Dickens

Biodiversity Education Officer