The Butterfly Conservation has recently carried out a big butterfly count in the UK. All that participants needed do to take part was spend 15 minutes watching butterflies and day-flying moths in any sunny place between 16th and 31st July. Then they had to make a note of what they saw and visit the Big Butterfly Count website to enter their sightings.

Unfortunately the latest results show that the situation is not good as three quarters of Britain’s 56 different types of butterfly have declined since the 1970s. Britain’s butterflies are the best-studied insects in the world and yet there is still much that is not known.

Two-thirds of the UK’s 56 butterfly species can live in woodland habitats, and 16 are considered woodland specialists. These include spectacular butterflies such as the Purple Emperor, White Admiral and Silver-washed Fritillary, some of Britain’s largest species.

There are also equally beautiful, if more commonplace butterflies, such as the bright-yellow Brimstone, ragged-edged Comma and beautiful Peacock, with its eye-spot patterns for scaring off would-be predators.

The results of the Big Butterfly Count 2011 revealed that the number of individual butterflies seen by each person counting the insects was down 11 per cent on last year.

Common blue butterflies were the biggest losers from the coldest summer for almost two decades, with numbers tumbling by almost two-thirds, experts have said. The common blue saw numbers tumble by 61 per cent in the count, which involved more than 34,000 people across the country recording sightings of 322,000 butterflies.