This is a personal study of the butterflies of one small valley in the New Forest, Hampshire, England, based on weekly counts of species and numbers seen each week throughout the months of April to September.  I started monitoring the butterflies in April 2015, and walk the same route each week, noting all the butterflies seen.  I have now completed eight consecutive years of records.

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Latchmore is a beautiful open valley with a combination of grazed pasture, heather moor, wooded enclosures, and even a valley mire.  The soil is poor and acidic, with bracken in abundance, and some thorn scrub beside the Latchmore Brook, which is a typical New Forest stream draining into the Hampshire Avon.

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I have created a separate page for each of the 31 species of butterfly I have seen, and also produced summary pages for each year, and an analysis of the trends, showing how species have fluctuated over the years.  

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All the photographs were taken by me, usually on the Latchmore route or nearby in the New Forest.  See the Background pages for more about me, and details of the location.

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I completed my eighth year of monitoring in 2022, with a record made on each of the 26 weeks of the season (thanks to John French for covering my holiday in September!).  This year has been particularly poor, due in large part to the extended drought and heatwave, which severely hampered the second half of the year.  Plants withered, butterflies died off quicker than normal, and there was no recovery in September.  More analysis of 2022 can be found here.

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Nigel Owen, November 2022