18-08-2025: The Kingston University Big Butterfly Count 2025 Results

I hope you have all been having a great summer so far. At Kingston University (KU) volunteers have been busy across our sites surveying lots of locations for Butterfly Conservation's Big Butterfly Count 2025. 

Since we started doing the surveys at Kingston University back in 2014, the number of survey locations across our campuses have varied each year. This year was one of the first where I tried to replicate the survey locations from the previous year using What3Words to sign volunteers a more accurate survey location. 

Over time we have slowly increased to a total of 32 survey locations across our sites. This year we nearly had a full house of surveys at all locations, and the only reason we missed out was because I forgot to add the Kingston Hill Memorial Garden in as one of the survey locations! That's been fixed in advance for next year so hopefully that won't be missed again!

Our top species was the Large White with the highest number of sites (23 out of the 31 locations surveyed) and in second place was the Small White spotted at 18 out of 31 locations.

The table and chart below show the full breakdown of the results by survey location. If you click on each, they should become bigger on your screen. 

It was great having 16 volunteers take on a lot of survey sites this year, we recorded 18 species across all of the KU sites. In terms of numbers, this year appeared to be a better one to last year, with 210 individual butterflies and moths spotted over the surveys compared to 131 in 2024. We also had fewer surveys with zero counts (5 surveys this year compared to 12 last year). Hopefully this might be a hopeful indication for the national survey results which are still being analysed by Butterfly Conservation, this link will take you to the declaration of a butterfly emergency following last years counts: https://butterfly-conservation.org/news-and-blog/uk-butterfly-emergency-declared   

Marion, one of our volunteers, spotted lots of striking Peacock Butterfly Caterpillars on the Stinging Nettles at our Middle Mill location. This shows the importance of this plant as a food source for this stunning butterfly. Hopefully we'll see more Peacock butterflies flying around Middle Mill as a result. 

One of our volunteers Mel, has been uploading her images of butterflies caught on different campuses on our iNaturalist Project, you can check them out here as well as other wildlife that people have been spotting across our sites https://uk.inaturalist.org/projects/kingston-university-london-biodiversity?tab=observations. If you use iNaturalist, why not join the project and the images of the wildlife you spot on our site with everyone?

Thank you again for everyone who has taken part this year. We'll be back near year for more butterfly surveys, so if you want to take part next year, add a reminder in your calender now and check out the Kingston University Biodiversity Eventbrite page here internal_ref=loginhttps://www.eventbrite.co.uk/o/kingston-university-biodiversity-action-group-17787553342?internal_ref=login in June 2026 :)

Until next time. 

take care

Sivi