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The largeYour browser does not support the element. blue butterfly has a strange life. After munching on wild thyme flowers for a few days, it drops to the ground and persuades a particular species of red ant to carry it into a nest. It stays underground for months, impersonating an ant grub and snacking on its hosts. Eventually, it crawls out of the nest and flies.It became extinct in Britain in 1979, just as scientists began to understand its idiosyncratic needs. But a few years later two researchers, David Simcox and Jeremy Thomas, brought some eggs from Sweden. The reintroduction of the large blue has been so successful that Britain lords it over continental Europe, where the butterfly continues to decline. More than half a million eggs are laid in the country each year.Britons have been reintroducing species since the 1830s, when the capercaillie, a large bird, was brought to Scotland from Sweden for the purpose of shooting it. The onset of rapid climate change and the vogue for rewilding have made them much keener. Alastair Driver of Rewilding Britain, a charity, knows of plans to reintroduce 64 species to 45 sites. Some, like red squirrels and devil’s-bit scabious, a plant, never disappeared from Britain but are missing from particular places. Others, like Eurasian beavers, had vanished.The beavers are famous for their furriness and for their ability to transform landscapes. So are white-tailed eagles, which were reintroduced to Scotland beginning in the 1970s and have more recently been released in the Isle of Wight. But many of the projects involve insects. Chequered skipper butterflies have been brought from Belgium to Northamptonshire, where they are thriving. Narrow-headed ants, which had been driven into a single wildlife refuge in southern England, have been moved around the country.In December Forestry England announced that it had moved plugs of earth containing fungi from an old forest to a new one. The distance travelled was short, just nine miles (14.5km), and the species involved could hardly be less photogenic. But fungi are crucial for plant health, and they are collectively massive, with a global biomass thought to be several times greater than all animals. “Very few top predators can be reintroduced,” says Andrew Stringer of Forestry England. The smaller stuff is where the action is.People who work on reintroductions and translocations describe many difficulties. Funding for projects is often short-term, and can cease as soon as creatures are released. Governments dither over the status of some species, including the Eurasian beaver (some have been released illicitly by impatient rewilders, a practice known as “beaver bombing”). Farmers object to some toothy and clawed creatures.Regulations to prevent suffering and the spread of diseases have become far more exacting. In the 1980s Mr Simcox, who is now at the Royal Entomological Society, set out to collect large blue butterflies in a camper van. When Nigel Bourn of Butterfly Conservation brings chequered skipper butterflies to England, vets check the insects before and after the journey to see how they are coping. It does not deter him at all. Mr Bourn says that discussions are under way about bringing back two other butterflies.
