Wildlife charity Butterfly Conservation recorded 746 Wood White sightings at Fineshade Wood this year, compared with 73 in 2025.

The project started just a year before in 2024, when the project team translocated 20 adult butterflies to Fineshade Wood from Hazelborough Forest and Bucknell Wood in South Northamptonshire – all Forestry England sites.

The team released an extra 23 butterflies at Fineshade last summer and volunteers counted a total of 73 all year – now the population has exploded with nearly ten times the number of sightings per hour.

Butterfly Conservation Central England Conservation Manager Dr Jamie Wildman said: "The number of butterflies being seen by our volunteers and members of the public is absolutely extraordinary: we’re delighted to see the population boom so quickly since the start of the reintroduction."

The Wood White is a delicate butterfly that has cream-coloured wings with furry fringes. Males perform courtship displays in which they land opposite females, extend their tongue-like proboscis and wave their head and antennae back and forth over the female’s wings.

The species used to be found across southern England into eastern Wales, but since 1992 its distribution has plummeted by 76 per cent. It depends on sunny, sheltered woodland habitats with abundant wildflowers and caterpillar foodplants - conditions that have become increasingly scarce as land management practices have changed.

The butterfly now survives in only a dozen fragments of its former range across southern England and Wales.

While this year's warm spring weather is likely to have accelerated caterpillar development, it would have counted for little without years of painstaking habitat management by Butterfly Conservation and Forestry England to maintain open rides (grass pathways through the forest) and create suitable conditions for vital caterpillar food plants such as Bird's-foot Trefoil and Meadow Vetchling.

Since this year's Wood White surveys started, England has experienced its driest July on record which will now have an effect on caterpillars, but Butterfly Conservation and Forestry England will continue to monitor the site and try to make it as resilient as possible against a changing climate.

If they are successful, the charity says Fineshade Wood will act like a 'beating heart' for the Wood White, sending butterflies out into the surrounding countryside and woodland and helping to secure the species' future in Northamptonshire.