---
title: "A zoo's bid to bring back a butterfly Britain lost a century ago"
description: "Dartmoor Zoo has begun breeding black-veined white butterflies — a species extinct in Britain since 1925 — with plans to release them into the Devon countryside as early as next summer, in a conservation push partners hope can restore a small piece of the nation's depleted wildlife."
category: "Science"
category_url: https://newsparlor.com/category/science
author: "Sofia Russo"
published: 2026-06-28T06:11:00.000Z
updated: 2026-06-28T06:11:00.000Z
canonical: https://newsparlor.com/article/dartmoor-zoo-black-veined-white-butterfly
tags: ["butterflies", "conservation", "wildlife", "rewilding", "uk-nature", "dartmoor-zoo"]
---
# A zoo's bid to bring back a butterfly Britain lost a century ago

Dartmoor Zoo has begun breeding black-veined white butterflies — a species extinct in Britain since 1925 — with plans to release them into the Devon countryside as early as next summer, in a conservation push partners hope can restore a small piece of the nation's depleted wildlife.

For nearly everyone alive in Britain today, the black-veined white butterfly has never existed here. The medium-sized white, its wings traced with fine dark veins, was last recorded in the country in 1925. Now a Devon zoo is trying to bring it back.

## Nine females and a fast start

[Dartmoor Zoo](https://www.dartmoorzoo.org.uk/) has received nine female black-veined whites from Normandy in France — where the species remains common — and within ten minutes of arriving, one had already begun laying eggs, [the BBC reported](https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c07ymknp11do). Staff took the quick response as an encouraging sign for a captive-breeding program that aims to release butterflies at a site in east Devon as early as next summer.

## A collaborative effort

The zoo is working with the Knepp rewilding estate in Sussex, Royal Holloway University and the charity Butterfly Conservation. The zoo's chief executive, Dr David Gibson, described the black-veined white as among "the rarest animals in the UK at the moment" and placed the project alongside higher-profile reintroductions. "Bringing one single butterfly back is just as important as reintroducing pine martens, lynx or even wolves," he told the BBC, adding that "pollinators are the absolute foundation of food systems, and plant life, and nature as a whole."

## Why it vanished

The species — first catalogued as British centuries ago — disappeared as pesticide use spread after the First World War and as the hawthorn and blackthorn hedgerows it depends on were cleared from the countryside. The butterfly lays clutches of eggs on plants in the rose family, including hawthorn, blackthorn, apple and pear, and its caterpillars overwinter together in silken webs before emerging in spring. Restoring and protecting those hedgerow habitats will be as important to any comeback as the breeding itself.

## A false dawn, and the bigger picture

In 2023, small numbers of black-veined whites were spotted in hedgerows on the edge of southeast London, briefly raising hopes of a natural return; Butterfly Conservation told the BBC at the time that they had [almost certainly been released](https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-65804939) rather than arriving on their own. The Dartmoor effort is the first structured, science-backed attempt to give the species a permanent home in Britain again. Gibson did not soften the context, calling the UK "one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world" — a judgment echoed by long-running monitoring that has tracked steep declines in many British butterflies. Success, conservationists say, would mean not a single summer of butterflies but a self-sustaining population, returning to the Devon hedgerows year after year.