Duke of Burgundy Fritillary

• It is the only European species of a family with more than fourteen hundred species in tropical America: an isolated relic on this continent.
• It needs woodland clearings at a particular point in the succession, neither too open nor too closed, and the abandonment of traditional woodland management has driven it out of much of its European range.
• The males, fiercely territorial, perch in the sun and chase off any insect that enters their patch.
• It is the only European species of its family, the riodinids, a group of more than a thousand species almost all concentrated in the American tropics. In Europe it is a taxonomic rarity.
• Its caterpillar depends on cowslips and oxlips, and it needs plants growing in woodland clearings with partial shade: if the clearing closes over or opens up too much, the plant no longer serves it.
• That narrow requirement explains its decline: the species has vanished from much of its range in the United Kingdom and other countries, not for lack of food plants but through the abandonment of the traditional woodland practices that created clearings.
• Males perch with their wings open on low vegetation and defend small territories in the sunny clearings.

Skeleton type

Invertebrate - chitin exoskeleton (insect)

Habitat & environment

Woodland clearings and edges and limestone meadows with primroses

Sources consulted: Butterfly Conservation (Reino Unido); Tolman y Lewington; Thomas y Lewington, The Butterflies of Britain and Ireland

Best time: May and June, in woodland clearings with primroses