When we think of rewilding, it is natural for our mind’s eye to open onto a wide vista, be it a swathe of forest untamed by wolves, a tract of grassland where large grazers have been renewed, or an expanse of ocean in which marine mammals, despite centuries of setbacks, are exuberant once again. But while such an outlook is broad in its perception of grandeur, it misses those smaller elements of life that are essential for the thriving of ecosystems and which contribute so much to the flourishing beauty of Earth.
In order to take in the full gamut of rewilding, we must go beyond considering just landscape-level shifts in vegetation and those glamorous agents of change who, living lives on a scale even larger than our own, set the heart racing. While such developments rightly demand celebration, to focus on them alone is to gaze at an oil painting from which half the canvas has been torn away. Rather, for a complete picture it is also necessary to heed the diminutive majority – those all-too-easily ignored beings who do nothing less than powering nature’s beating heart. Thus, in this piece, I delve into the microcosmos of six-legged life.
While the relatively rich history of butterfly-boosting initiatives that exists should not be ignored, it is fair to say that the Insecta have, until recently, been largely overlooked as a taxonomic class in conservation. But times are changing. This fact is evidenced, for instance, in the contemporary surge in concern for bees. Moreover, there are already numerous rewilding projects in which the benefits for insects are a focus.
My goal here is not to offer an extensive catalogue of relevant initiatives but rather to present a range of examples illustrating the breadth of restorative work that is taking place across the globe for the benefit of our compact cousins. I will divide my sampling into four categories, these being insect reintroductions, habitat recovery with insect flourishing as a focus, ventures to support insect migration and movement, and other programmes in which insects are being considered as secondary beneficiaries. There is overlap between these groups. But then blurry edges are a hallmark of rewilding, because this is a branch of conservation that truly recognises the connectedness of everything.
There is a fifth category, one that I will not attempt to represent here. This final group contains all other projects; for it is hard to imagine a successful rewilding enterprise in which insects are not benefiting, on balance, even if they are not being explicitly considered.
Insect reintroductions
The re-establishment of lost insects has a history that goes back more than a hundred years. In 1909, for instance, the British entomologist George Verrall released caterpillars of the large copper butterfly at Wicken Fen, a remnant of a once-vast marshland in eastern England. This wetland butterfly had become extinct in Great Britain sometime after the middle of the previous century, when the last populations succumbed to a combination of pressures that included habitat drainage and specimen collection by naturalists (the caterpillars released in 1909 came from a Continental subspecies). Verrall’s early effort at reintroducing the large copper set the scene for numerous further attempts to do so in the region. All have failed, so far. But the conditions for a potential success are improving, now that the Great Fen project is underway. This long-term habitat recovery programme will restore more than 3000 hectares of biologically rich marshland in eastern England, and the large copper butterfly may be one of the future beneficiaries of this work.
Over a century after Verrall’s unsuccessful attempt at species introduction, the restoration of lost butterflies has become a global activity. To cite one of the many examples from the western hemisphere, work is currently going on to re-establish the Mission blue, a subspecies of Boisduval’s blue, in grassland to the south of San Francisco, USA. Like many threatened butterflies, this subspecies is a polar opposite to that poster species of rewilding, Canis lupus. Small and delicate, restricted to a tiny range of foods, and able to disperse barely a quarter of a mile, the Mission blue is nothing like a wolf. Yet, just as actions to help the iconic canid provide heart-warming examples of rewilding in action, so too does the work being carried out, via the careful translocation of flutterring adults, to safeguard and enrich the future of this scaly-winged treasure.
Moving beyond the realm of butterflies, there are numerous other insect re-establishment efforts being undertaken around the world. To expand on the breadth of these, I will shortly be hopping to another continent, Oceania. First, though, I will return to the fens of eastern England. Here, it was not just butterflies who suffered from the large-scale draining of ancient wetland, but other kinds of insects too, including the large marsh grasshopper. This species, the largest native grasshopper in Great Britain, is the focus of a reintroduction activity called a Hop of Hope that is being led by Citizen Zoo. Through a mixture of direct translocations and captive breeding – drawing on a distant surviving population in the New Forest – this long-limbed herbivore has been returned to several ecological suitable sites in eastern England.
On the opposite side of the planet, another orthopteran species has recently benefited from translocation work. The Larapuna matchstick grasshopper, a flightless insect with limited dispersal capacity, was introduced to 36 sites in urban Melbourne, Australia, as part of a study published in 2023. The early results have been encouraging, with the species having been found to still be present a year later in 28 of the release sites.
Like the Mission blue butterfly and this Australian grasshopper, numerous kinds of insect are extremely limited in their capacity for dispersal to novel sites. Wood ants provide a particularly important example, with various species being reticent to move through unsuitable habitat in search of a new home. Returning to Great Britain once more, a number of projects have been undertaken here to help re-establish these keystone organisms where they are missing, including in parts of the Scottish Highlands and eastern England. Their vital ecological role in woodland ecosystems includes being a food for predators, dispersing the seeds of a variety of plants, aiding the growth of trees, helping with the cycling of nutrients, causing physical disturbance to soils, and creating, in their needle-pile nests, a niche for a range of ant-dependent invertebrates.
Habitat recovery for insect flourishing
While the translocation work described above is an important tool in the rewilding of smaller life-forms, biodiversity can also be enhanced by insect-focused habitat recovery with a view to unassisted repopulation. Many species of insect are capable of moving some distance through unsuitable environment, while others are clinging on in ecologically declining sites, desperately waiting for a favourable change in their circumstances.
One place in Central Europe where an insect-focused approach to habitat restoration is being trialled is Beckovske Skalice – a hilly landscape of grassland and woodland in western Slovakia that is encircled by agriculture and urban development. In this potential oasis, the open microhabitats needed by various species of moth and butterfly, such as the Danube clouded yellow, are receding as woody vegetation is beginning to dominate.
To reverse this trend, under the auspices of Mossy Earth, an initial removal of vegetation is being coupled with the husbandry of various herbivores – including goats and donkeys – in an attempt to mimic the natural grazing regime of centuries gone. These locally practical grazers will act as analogues for the wild bison, oxen, and horses who roamed in the past. And the mosaic of grazed grassland and oak pasture that the restoration will support is undoubtedly going to aid a suite of struggling residents and future incomers. In addition to butterflies and moths, these beneficiaries will include solitary bees, grasshoppers, beetles, and many other insects.
It is not just terrestrial restoration projects where insects may be a focus for recovery, but aquatic ones too. Moving further north in Europe, to Swedish Lapland, a promising scheme is underway there to rehabilitate the sediment-dwelling insect community in the Abramsån River. In the early twentieth century, when foresters sent large quantities of cut logs down this waterway, boulders were removed from the riverbed and the course of the channel was straightened and narrowed. A result of these interventions was the washing-away of much of the river’s fine-grained sediment, which had been a vital microhabitat for a variety of insects and other invertebrates.
Recent work by Rewilding Sweden has reversed the channelisation of the Abramsån and helped to revive a more natural flow, but the return of fine-grained sediment would be very slow if left entirely to nature. Thus, the next phase of the river’s reinvigoration has involved a helicopter drop of 150 tonnes of sand and gravel. Monitoring will take place over the coming years to quantify the kinds of sediment-dweller becoming re-established. As this process occurs, the benefits for the river’s ecology will include a higher retention of nutrients, through the feeding of these organisms on fallen leaves and other organic material in the water, as well as the provision of food for fish and other predators.
Migration and movement assistance
Long-distance migrations in the natural world are not unique to birds and mammals. One of the most celebrated examples of this ecological adaptation to seasonally changing conditions is seen in the monarch butterfly. Some populations of this pollinator species undergo an annual autumn passage to central Mexico from as far away as southern Canada, and this is followed by a multi-generational return trip that begins the following spring.
In order to help these butterflies complete their staggering journeys, various organisations – both south and north of the Mexico–USA border – promote monarch-friendly gardening to offer way stations, or stepping stones, for these long-distance travellers. While each individual garden might not be considered a true example of rewilding, taken en masse they are supporting one of the most magnificent manifestations of nature’s wild power.
A different aid to movement – one that follows directly from the second prong of Reed Noss and Michael Soulé’s foundational model for rewilding (core reserves, connectivity, and keystone species) – is the promotion of insect-friendly corridors through unfavourable terrain. Somewhat similarly to how the genetic health of mammals depends on a mixing of genes between populations, the movement of individual insects from one local site to another may be crucial, for at least some species, in ensuring the long-term survival of umbrella populations. And, of course, the permeability of the landscape is of major significance here. In addition to supporting those all-important exchanges between subpopulations, enhancing landscape permeability could reduce the need for translocations and also help insects to track the changing climate.
One recently commenced activity aiming to help insects move through the landscape is being led by Planet Wild and Pro Natura in Switzerland. These organisations are seeking to improve the quality of the environment along power-line corridors in order to reconnect fragments of biotically rich habitat. This will benefit various species of insect along with a wide range of other organisms.
A longer-running initiative to improve landscape permeability for insects is a British project led by Buglife, which is known as B-Lines. There is an excellent article by the conservationist Chris Gibson that reflects on this particular undertaking, as well as freedom of movement for small organisms more generally.
Projects with insects as secondary beneficiaries
All of the work described up to this point has had a deliberate focus on insects, but there are other activities in which the benefits for these bijou beings have emerged as more of a corollary occurrence. The Knepp Estate in southern England – where ecological restoration has taken place in the wake of modern intensive farming – provides a classic example of deliberately directionless rewilding. While there have been no official targets or associated interventions relating specifically to insect biodiversity, the estate has become a haven for a myriad of six-legged life-forms, from violet dor beetles to scarce chaser dragonflies.
As a marker of rewilding’s impact here, the number of butterfly species thought to be present on the estate has tripled to around 40 from a baseline of thirteen back in 2005. Intensified monitoring efforts and climate-driven changes to species ranges may have contributed to the increase, but rewilding has undoubtedly played a significant role in enhancing the local biodiversity. Thanks to the improvements in species richness and abundance, butterfly safaris are now offered on the site, helping to finance the estate’s rewilding programme. And while the overarching programme has not been steered towards any particular group of organisms, the owners’ fondness for lepidopteran life is evident in their choice of the purple emperor butterfly, an especially striking beneficiary, for the Knepp emblem.
Moving south now, to the west coast of France, there is a rewilding venture on the Étang de Cousseau nature reserve, near Bordeaux, that has been unfolding over several decades. The implementation back in 1990 of semi-natural grazing – courtesy of Marine-Landaise cows, an ancient cattle breed – has not just helped restore the reserve’s patchwork of heaths and marshland but created niches for other life-forms too. Back in 1990, dung beetles and other coprophagous fauna were limited in diversity and number. Thanks to the Marine-Landaise cows, though, the abundance and richness of these organisms has slowly increased over the years. Now the guild of dung feeders comprises around 30 species on the site, including some nationally rare taxa. Crucially, the cows are not subject to any preventative antiparasitic treatment, which greatly increases the quality of their digestive deposits as a food source and a site for larval development.
While the return of coprophagous life to the nature reserve has been remarkable, monitoring has shown that some species of dung beetle formerly present in the region have not yet reappeared. One of the remaining notable absentees, as of 2022, was a species known as Scarabaeus laticollis. In work supported by Rewilding Europe, this beetle has recently been introduced to the nature reserve, further bolstering their ecological guild. For the most part, insects have been secondary beneficiaries of rewilding at Étang de Cousseau, but this is one example where they have been a primary focus of conservation activities.
Lastly, readers of a previous article that I wrote will know of my fondness for Eurasian beavers, and I will finish this survey of rewilding projects that have a recognised benefit for insects by saying something more about these resourceful rodents. As well as reshaping freshwater systems, beavers also create a home for insects and other invertebrates in the dams that they build. This is just one more way in which rewilding ventures helping beavers to return to their former territories are aiding a much broader range of living beings.
Concluding thoughts
Given the opportunity, insects can thrive in an extraordinary range of settings, from wild-running rivers to the dung deposits of herbivores, and from beaver-built barriers to piles of dead pine needles. Similarly diverse are the range of services that these organisms provide for the broader ecologies in which they exist, including decomposition, nutrient cycling, pollination, seed dispersal, soil disturbance, and the enriching of food webs. For these reasons and more, it is only by expanding our view to take in insects and other smaller life-forms that we can truly appreciate the profundity of rewilding’s power.
Joe Gray is a Founding Editor of ‘The Ecological Citizen’, Editor-in-Chief for Rewilding Successes and a writer for us at the GRA. In this series, which is named Rewilding Reflections, Joe is taking us on some thoughtful journeys through the wider dimensions of rewilding.
Photo details
- Large copper (photo by Anne Sorbes; CC BY-SA 3.0).
- Large marsh grasshopper (photo by Gilles San Martin; CC BY-SA 2.0).
- Danube clouded yellow (photo by Ilia Ustyantsev; CC BY-SA 2.0).
- Larva of Sialis lutaria, an alderfly found in Swedish rivers (photo by Aka CC BY-SA 2.5).
- Monarch butterflies (photo in public domain).
- Scarce chaser (photo by Charles J Sharp; CC BY-SA 4.0).
- Purple emperor (photo by Bernard Dupont; CC BY-SA 2.0).
- Scarabaeus laticollis (photo by Holger Krisp; CC BY 3.0).